Evan

“At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“To get a sense of the scale of Earth history, imagine walking back in time, a hundred years per step—every pace equal to more than three human generations. A mile takes you 175,000 years into the past. The twenty miles of Chesapeake cliffs, a hard day’s walk to be sure, correspond to more than 3 million years. But to make even a small dent in Earth history, you would have to keep walking at that rate for many weeks. Twenty days of effort at twenty miles a day and a hundred years per step would take you back 70 million years, to just before the mass death of the dinosaurs. Five months of twenty-mile walks would correspond to more than 530 million years, the time of the Cambrian “explosion”—the near-simultaneous emergence of myriad hard-shelled animals. But at a hundred years per footstep, you’d have to walk for almost three years to reach the dawn of life, and almost four years to arrive at Earth’s beginnings.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name