DC

“America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“According to Matthew Fisher, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the nuclear spin of phosphate atoms could serve as rudimentary quantum bits (so-called ‘qubits’) of information in the brain, since such phosphate atoms, bonded with calcium in Posner molecules (clusters of nine calcium atoms and six phosphorus atoms), can prevent coherent neural ‘qubits’ from collapsing into decoherence (non-quantum states) for long enough to enable the brain to function somewhat like a quantum computer.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity