Hari Iyer

“Lenin is often credited with coining the term “useful idiot,” poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing to the goals intended by the manipulator.”
― Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

“It was our capacity to learn from the experiences of others that gave Homo sapiens an enormous local advantage, with new strategies and innovations built on a platform of prior discoveries. As a consequence, each generation had no need to reinvent the wheel, and a child could acquire an understanding of the world that a few generations back would have been available only to geniuses.”
― William Von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy