Japhy Grant

“The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Promises take many shapes, and the more… momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“And where did logic belong? To psychology or to computer science? Surely not just to philosophy.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood