Rachel

“It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.

There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the questions, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It's up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

“What Matters to Me"
1. What matters to me is my family and close friends. In this way, I am like almost everyone else in the world.
2. What matters to me is my work, no longer as a professor, but as a writer reaching out to readers within and beyond the academic circle,
3. What matters to me is Nature, another form of beauty and truth. Throughout my life the natural world has been a source of enjoyment, comfort, and inspiration.
4. And now I remember...the fourth...It has to do with moral impulse, with the search for meaning and human connection, and with our relation to Nature, that we now lump together under the word "spirituality.”
― Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life

“So, is there energy enough for all? Yes. Is there food enough for all? Yes. Is there housing enough for all? There could be, there is no real problem there. Same for clothing. Is there health care enough for all? Not yet, but there could be; it’s a matter of training people and making small technological objects, there is no planetary constraint on that one. Same with education. So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.

In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's a different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future