Nicolette Rose

“To be in contact with someone else’s pain was to risk feeling it yourself, unless you severed the connection by hating them. When most people’s greatest desire was to avoid pain, of course they would rather hate.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

“There is a bizarre cultural tendency to treat physicists in particular as fascinating enigmas whose brains exist beyond the realm of everyday human politics. This isn’t true. The universe—including the human corners of it—is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more and no less.

People who saw the 2023 Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer may have walked away with the impression that the early 1940s were the glory days of genius white men who very unfortunately had to deal with complex moral questions and often made bad choices. In the chapters to come, some of the men portrayed in Oppenheimer appear, as do individuals from the same era who aren’t represented in the film. Some of them were real assholes. I mean assisting Nazis. I mean pursuing romance with underage teenage girls. I mean not doing much to facilitate the participation of women in physics, ignoring the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, doing little to push the boundaries of Jim Crow, and allowing women to be relegated to second-class social status, subservient to them. Even a bright thinker can be among the worst of us. You’ve already met a famous example: Isaac Newton, who invested in enslavement and, as master of the Royal Mint, was an unforgiving cop.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

“THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN
WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“You took by force what you always had by love.”
― Nikki Marmery, Lilith