Alexander

“they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism. The English poor were driven from the land into scary, scattered cities in the eighteenth century—and glugged their way into the Gin Craze. The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line. The American rural heartlands saw their markets and subsidies wither in the 1980s and 1990s—and embarked on a meth binge.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This isn’t a law of nature, and it isn’t caused by the drug—it is caused by the drug policy we have chosen. After the end of alcohol prohibition, White Lightning vanished—who’s even heard of it now?—and beer went back to being America’s favorite alcoholic drink. There are heroin addicts all across the United States today who would have stayed happily on Oxy if there had been a legal route to it.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs