Charlie

“Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“morality is just a rule of behaviour relative to the level of danger in which individuals live. If you’re living in dangerous times, you can’t afford to live according to moral structures the way someone who lives in safety and peace can. So it’s not actually some universal natural ting, you get me, and the professor says did everyone just get that?”
― Gabriel Krauze, Who They Was: A Novel

“In the past few decades we’ve learned to recognise the many hazards of poor nutrition: insulin resistance, obesity, susceptibility to inflammation and fatigue. All of these factors can contribute to an early death. We’ve altered our diets and learned to resist the siren call of sugar and other simple carbohydrates. We’ve now reached a similar point with the news; we think about it today much as we thought about sugar and fast food twenty years ago. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. The media is feeding us titbits that taste palatable but do nothing to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and well-researched long-form articles, the news cannot satiate us. We can gobble down as many articles as we like, but we will never be doing more than gorging on sweets. As with sugar, alcohol, fast food and smoking, the side effects only become apparent later.”
― Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!