Brendan

“Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in early industrial societies organized, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

“The atmosphere in the hall is electric with anticipation, as it might be for Bruce Springsteen at a sold-out concert or at a public appearance at Buckingham Palace by the queen of England. Indeed, this hall is also packed with breathless and enthusiastic devotees. But the star the audience is waiting for is not a musician or a queen, but a simple-living, elderly rabbi—the Rebbe or grand rabbi of the exclusively Hasidic village of New Square, New York. And what he will do is not entertain but simply light a Chanukah menorah.”
― Joseph Berger, The Pious Ones

“Yet in Germany no less than the United States, the political meaning of genocide has never been widely understood. Both populations have, for the most part, denounced genocide as a racist act, but neither has recognized that it was also a productive one, whose outcome is the nation-states in which they live.”
― Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

“Although the denazification process was widely reviled in Germany and beyond, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the logic of Nuremberg was revived in postcolonial contexts under the name of transitional justice, which repackages criminalization and victim’s justice in the language of human rights. The”
― Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities