Daniel Demarle

“The point of all these changes was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party. Or maybe we should call it, as we once did, the Party. They had no mandate to do this: Law and Justice was elected with a percentage of the vote that allowed them to rule but not to change the constitution. And so, in order to justify breaking the law, the party stopped using ordinary political arguments, and began identifying existential enemies instead.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”
― Chris van Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food… and Why Can't We Stop?

“Thus, in June 2019, New York State passed the most ambitious set of climate targets in the country, including carbon-free electricity by 2040 and a net zero emissions economy by 2050.”
― Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet; Library Edition