Sasha Stone

“Just to put it in a political perspective, zealots in the Middle East didn't just wake up one day and say, let's have some fun and blow up the Twin Towers! There was a history behind it -- Britain in the twenties, doing its Empire thing, then leaving when things got too hot, but leaving Persians, Arabs and so on with a mighty sense of having been ripped off and humiliated. People hold grudges -- we all have that trait, I think. Then we try to set things "right" and just make things worse. So people go to war. Add to that the fact that men have a tendency toward aggression, and women have a huge capacity for passive revenge, and you have a nice mix. And yet, the world is so beautiful! And always surprising. That's the cosmic goofy wonder of it all. . .”
― Carolyn See

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
― George Monbiot

“Yes, I do think the ruling class in America would like to grab everything for themselves, because they were brought up that way, and early American Puritans somehow had it wired into their religion that poverty is a sign that God doesn't like you, that you're not "saved," that money, on the other hand, is a sign of God's approval. They say the middle class in this country is shrinking, but I don't really know who the "they" is in that sentence. I tend to think there's a natural process of balances -- that when the very rich press their luck too far, there's a danger of a backlash, and the rich know it. There's often a time when the bully on the playground does one bad thing too many and all the little weaklings gang up on him, and that's the end of that particular pattern. I look at that stuff as a novelist, and as a human being, but I try not to get too worked up about it. I think of myself as wearing the invisible tee shirt with "You can kill me but you can't impress me" printed on it. Every second I spend laughing is a second I don't have to think about Vice President Cheney, for instance.”
― Carolyn See

“Morality doesn’t mean ‘following divine commands’. It means ‘reducing suffering’. Hence in order to act morally, you don’t need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century