Yuri Artibise

“Author compares the impact of biases to his experience as an average swimmer who overcame a considerable fear of water. While the swimming was easy in one particular experience, he was internally congratulating himself on his acquired skill. But when he realized he was swimming with a current he would now have to fight against, he realized just how definite his limits were.”
― Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

“Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“This familiar, comparative idea of normal is so common that perhaps it feels timeless and universal, but it wasn’t until around 1840 that the word was even used to describe human qualities in European languages. (Prior to that time, normal referred to being perpendicular or square, a technical term that would have been used, for example, by a carpenter.)”
― Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do?