Ryan Baseman

“Almost every culture has its own version of “forty days and forty nights,” where some young person is sent into the wilderness to survive, or to have a vision, or both. It’s a rite of passage, a way to select or strengthen the tribe’s warriors. The individual is stripped of everything. No clothes, no weapons, no food. The ones that come back are transformed in a way that the elders recognize and the uninitiated envy. The calm confidence in one’s own abilities coupled with a dash of enlightenment is a powerful combination. But what does a modern warrior do with that?”
― Gary Sizer, Home is Forward: Hiking and Travel Adventures from Around the World

“The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government