Brad Barlow

“Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“the era of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are indispensable in order to save humanity. They are like childhood, the salt of the earth: that if it loses its flavor—as a French writer warned—the world will be nothing but putrefaction and canker. When the individuality of the heart is not appreciated, we lose the answers that intelligence alone cannot give, we lose the encounter with others, and we lose history and our histories, because the real personal adventure is that which is accomplished from the heart. At the end of life, all that matters will be this. —”
― Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography

“Humanity is the only species that actively debates whether or not it should maintain the environmental conditions necessary for its own continued existence. Other species do not struggle with this sort of thing.”
― Natalie Kyriacou, Nature's Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction

“Thank you is a phrase that is fundamental to life, starting with family life. Together with please and sorry, it’s a key that opens the way to a well-lived life, to a life of peace.”
― Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography