David Mihalyi

“Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“It began at those very Shabbat meals in Cape Town, when I began considering the other people who were present. They hovered around the periphery, in the kitchen or the garden, doing the menial work. They were legally subordinate, which, I was told, was necessary. Because they would kill us if they could. Somewhere, their Black terror army was plotting to do just that. As I reached adulthood, that story collapsed. Apartheid ended. The army that had frightened so many whites disbanded once Black South Africans could express themselves with a ballot rather than a gun. Profound inequities remained; the country did not live happily ever after. Still, the story I heard constantly in my youth—that safety required supremacy—largely disappeared. It’s now an embarrassment. Barely anyone tells that story about South Africa anymore.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
That is real freedom.
That is being taught how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life