Caitlin

“The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. They've been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack. Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asking whether he's seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says. Little hasn't seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldn't mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the man's answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across decades. "I am," said the old man, "a musician.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“It must be remembered that this was 1868, before the biologists had had any great triumphs in the agricultural or medical fields. When Pasteur, a few years later, showed that the pebrine disease of silkworms could be controlled and that rabies could be cured scientists gained tremendous prestige and things were different. This attitude persisted until the 1940s, it tending to be held generally that a man who knew all about, say, compression physics was entitled to pontificate on politics, religion and anything else. After the explosion of the hydrogen bombs the world began to realize that outside their immediate field scientists could be as stupid as anyone else; inside it at times too.”
― George Ordish, The Great Wine Blight

“We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now. Fifty years ago, everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb. That was power. No one could imagine anything more. Yet, a bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power. And it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question--What should I do with my power?--which is the very question science says it cannot answer.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“He cleared his throat and read from the book: "'It was at moments such as these that Joseph recognized the face of God in human form. It glimmered in their kindness to him, it glowed in their keenness, it hinted in their caring, indeed it caressed in their gaze.'"
...
"If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary--the world really would be a better place. And if you do this, if you act just a little kinder than is necessary, someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God.”
― R.J. Palacio, Wonder