Kevin

“Addressing people who were similarly confused as to what path in life to follow, the Buddha once suggested to the Kālāma people: “Do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with liking for a view after pondering over it or with someone else’s ability or with the thought: ‘the monk is our guru.’ When you know in yourselves: ‘these things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and being adopted and put into effect they lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should practice and abide in them.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Any examined human life involves the realization that we have been thrown into this world, without any choice, only to look forward to the prospect of being expelled at death. The sheer sense of bafflement and perplexity at this situation is crucial to spiritual awareness. To opt for a comforting, even a discomforting, explanation of what brought us here or what awaits us after death severely limits that very rare sense of mystery with which religion is essentially concerned. We thereby obscure with consoling man-made concepts that which most deeply terrifies and fascinates us.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“as eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt saw back in 1951: “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”
― Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

“Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America