Pablo Rodriguez

“paraphrase the nineteenth-century Haitian historian Émile Nau. It is an impossible endeavor in many ways—we cannot simply slip into someone else’s place. But the attempt itself is essential. It has the potential to disrupt, if fleetingly, our assumptions about people, places, and pasts. It nudges us to glimpse the world differently, to grasp history on a more human scale, perhaps even to see ourselves through the eyes of others.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow