Japhy Grant

“When we suffer we think that the other person has caused our suffering. “She doesn’t love me. So why do I have to love her?” Our natural tendency is to want to punish the other person. And the way we do that is to show her that “I can survive very well without you.” This is an indirect way of saying: “I don’t need you.” But that’s not true love. Many of us have made that mistake. I also have made that mistake. But we learn. In fact, when we suffer we do need the other person. That’s the commitment we made in the beginning of our relationship.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“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

“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

“Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as “the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board.”♦”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood