June

“If God exists, maybe He can simultaneously feel the pain and pleasure of every sentient being. But for us mortals, empathy really is a spotlight. It’s a spotlight that has a narrow focus, one that shines most brightly on those we love and gets dim for those who are strange or different or frightening.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“(To use a very simple example, most of the younger generations in modernized countries have acquired everyday information retrieval skills that were only twenty years ago the sole possession of librarians and other information professionals; they have also acquired expectations of information quantity and accessibility that would have been unimaginable for ordinary people even twenty years ago.)”
― Ronald E. Day, Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data

“The accusation can be made only by conflating the CCP with Chinese people so that being anti-CCP must mean being anti-Chinese. (It’s exactly what the CCP wants us to think.) It’s a cheap accusation, but it serves as an effective silencing device in this country because of the widespread, and quite proper, sensitivity to inflaming racial tensions.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don’ts.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century