Vikas Agarwal

“Fear makes us selfish,” Katherine said. “The more we fear death, the more we cling to ourselves, our belongings, our safe spaces … to that which is familiar. We exhibit increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. We flout authority, ignore social mores, steal from others to provide for ourselves, and become more materialistic. We even abandon our feelings of environmental responsibility because we sense the planet is a lost cause and we’re all doomed anyway.” “That’s alarming,” Nagel said. “Those are precisely the behaviors that fuel global unrest, terrorism, cultural division, and war.” “Yes, and that make the CIA’s job so difficult. Unfortunately, it becomes a hall of mirrors. The worse things get, the worse we behave. And the worse we behave, the worse things get.” “And it’s your theory that this troubling”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

“Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Think about the psychology of that kind of change. “If you’re just below that tipping point—you’re at 20 percent—you have no idea how close you are,” Centola says. In one of the versions of his game, with twenty people, having four dissidents didn’t make the slightest difference. But when he added one more—bringing the outsiders up to the magic 25 percent mark—the consensus abruptly shifted. “You don’t know that [with] one or two more people, you could trigger that tipping point,” he said. If change happened gradually, you could see that you were getting closer and closer to your goal—and you wouldn’t be surprised when you reached it. But if nothing happens and then everything happens, you are in the strange position of being discouraged during the long stretch when nothing is happening and stunned at the point when it all shifts.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering