Tanja Berg

“That man-made climate change is real, and potentially an existential threat to many communities around the world and many aspects of civilisation, is so well established as a scientific fact by this point that it seems kind of dull to run over the evidence again.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans, and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don’t yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. The only trouble is … well, we’re not terribly good at any of those things. Any honest assessment of humanity’s previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you. We imagine patterns where they don’t exist. Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking. And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realise that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“That was the use of knives for women: to cut food for the men who killed with their knives… who killed those women's husbands, their sons, and their daughters.”
― Cornelia Funke, Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

“More people were killed by lawnmowers than by terrorism in the USA in the decade between 2007 and 2017, but at the time of writing, the US government has yet to launch a War on Lawnmowers. (Although, let’s be honest, given recent events you wouldn’t rule it out.)”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up