Zach

“Sexual selection usually behaves like an insanely greedy tabloid newspaper editor who deletes all news and leaves only advertisements. In human evolution, it is as if the editor suddenly recognized a niche market for news in a few big-brained readers.
She told all her reporters she wanted wall-to-wall news, but she never bothered to set up a fact-checking department. Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“The answer lies in the fact that slave labor, in spite of its seeming superiority, was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor the first half of the century. Because of the high mortality among immigrants to Virginia, there could be no great advantage in owning a man for a lifetime rather than a period of years, especially since a slave cost roughly twice as much as an indentured servant. If the chances of a man's dying during his first five years in Viriginia were fifty-fifty – and it seems apparent that they were- and if English servants could be made to work as hard as slaves, English servants for a five-year term were the better buy.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“It is hard to go into a fight and were often afraid," confessed the Cheyenne warrior John Stands in Timber, "but it was worse to turn back and face the women.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West