Alexandra Soos

“People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual. Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their facial prejudice into the laws, politics, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“In debates about the death
penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane
to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse
someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing
people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that
doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing
someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time
contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn't just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern - a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence