Himanshu Rai

“Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of white people of European descent, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed?”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable