Ali Alper

“People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

“Polemical energy is wasted on showing that liberalism’s aims and ideals are narrowly Western, secular-Enlightened, bourgeois-individualist, procapitalist or—to use a fashionable term of abuse—rootlessly cosmopolitan. None of these slurs or labels stick. No sect or party owns liberalism’s aims and ideals. They serve every nation, gender and class. If that brands liberals as universalists, so be it. They may wear their scarlet “U” with pride.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea