I know enough about climate science to know that it would take me years to really get it. Trusting those who’ve studied the subject in depth for decades seems like a pretty good bet to me.
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“The U.S. is blessed with many excellent protected natural harbors: more on our East Coast alone than in all the rest of the Americas south of the Mexican border.”
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Why have selfish assholes so often found, in Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, intellectual justification for their antisocial behavior? Probably because it’s there.
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“Japan’s wartime behavior towards China and Korea continues to poison its current relations with those countries.”
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One of modernity’s greatest achievements is the rejection of notions of collective guilt. But if Between the World and Me has an overriding message, it’s that we need to revisit the notion of collective guilt.
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“While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers.”
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“The average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants.”
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Do we really need a clumsy concept like “Islamophobia” to describe the anti-Muslim bigotry in our midst? Probably not.
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The enemy has come to believe that he can sway elections with bombs, shape foreign policy with fear, and write laws with blood.
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“The game is called Check Your Privilege. Another name for it might be Who Is More Righteous Than I? It’s learned in college, but it’s played mostly online.”
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If a language is a dialect with an army, good grammar is what language sounds like when power speaks.
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“Einstein’s primary psychological driving force was the quest for beauty, and he was spurred on by his certainty that the laws of nature are pervaded by the deepest, most divine beauty of all.”
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Comedy is far more of a threat to the powerful than philosophy, as it can get through to people who are never going to hear the harsh criticism of a Socrates.
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Jacob T. Levy’s ode to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
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“In our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”
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When the herd moves in one direction, most of us fall into line without even realizing that we’re falling into line.
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Religion is rarely taken at face value as a real motive force behind violent action in the world in the secular West.
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As my friend Suzan put it, “This is so Montreal it makes me want to cry.”
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Rights-scolding consists in lecturing others about what jerks they are to think they have a right to something.
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There is a type of person (you know this person) who only loves things (e.g., musicians, bands, musical styles, authors, ideas, causes, movements, etc.) until they become popular.
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