Pete Farlam

“The National Party (NP) tried to make its nakedly racist system seem palatable with the phrase 'separate development' - perhaps Apartheid's greatest lie. The truth was that in Verwoerd's magic kingdom, Snow White carried a sjambok and beat the shit out of anyone that failed the pencil test.”
― Jonathan Ancer, BULLSH!T: 50 Fibs That Made South Africa

“This drives populists to be skeptical of the pursuit of truth, and to argue... that 'power is the only reality.' They thereby seek to undercut or appropriate the authority of any independent institutions that might oppose them. The result is a dark and cynical view of the world as a jungle and of human beings as creatures obsessed with power alone. All social interactions are seen as power struggles, and all institutions are depicted as cliques promoting the interests of their own members...”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me