Diane Bluegreen

“Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable." - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993”
― Tony Hillerman

“It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.”
― David Brin, The Postman

“How can we account for long-term memory”, van Lommel asks, “if the molecular makeup of the cell membrane of neurons is completely renewed every two weeks and the millions of synapses in the brain undergo a process of constant adaptation?”15”
― Greg Taylor, Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife

“Donna made it obvious that not only is addiction a developmental journey, but it’s a journey that continues through the period of recovery. In fact, by the time I’d finished my interviews with Donna, the term “recovery” no longer made sense to me. “Recovery” implies going backward, becoming normal again. And it’s a reasonable term if you consider addiction a disease. But many of the addicts I’ve spoken with—including Donna—see themselves as having moved forward, not backward, once they quit, or even while they were quitting. They often find they’ve become far more aware and self-directed than the person they were before their addiction. There’s no easy way to explain this direction of change with the medical terminology of disease and recovery. Instead of recovering, it seems that addicts keep growing, as does anyone who overcomes their difficulties through deliberation and insight.”
― Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease