“Zum ersten Mal habe ich Angst – nicht nur vor unseren Feinden, sondern auch vor meinen Freunden.”
Source: Realitätssprünge - Zirkel: Epische Fantasy über Freundschaft, Macht und Wahrheit
“Human beings evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves. But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we're trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”
Source: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“Trusting desire, starting to learn
Walking through fire without a burn
Clinging a shoulder, a leap begins
Stinging and older, asleep on pins”
Source: Rent: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Musical―Complete Libretto and Oral History
“Trust cannot be demanded, it must be earned through honorable behavior repeated over time. Leaders who protect trust as a strategic asset create organizations that are stable, respected, and resilient. Where trust is strong, everything else becomes easier.”
Source: Dokkodo for Leaders : 21 Samurai Principles for Clear Thinking, Tough Decisions, and Growth
“So far I’ve been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times. I’ve been writing as if we live in a healthy cultural environment, in a society in which people are enmeshed in thick communities and webs of friendship, trust, and belonging. We don’t live in such a society. We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.”
Source: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“There is no way to make hard conversations un-hard. You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own. I will never know what it is like to be Black, to be a woman, to be Gen Z, to be born with a disability, to be a working-class man, to be a new immigrant or a person from any of a myriad of other life experiences. There are mysterious depths to each person. There are vast differences between different cultures, before which we need to stand with respect and awe. Nevertheless, I have found that if you work on your skills—your capacity to see and hear others—you really can get a sense of another person’s perspective. And I have found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.”
Source: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: “Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?”
“It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the exec ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.”
I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”
Source: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
“Every truth hides a lie, and every lie hides a motive.”
Source: Double Take
“Listen to your soul's inner wisdom.”
“He’d tried again and again to put his trust in people who didn’t deserve it. Until he just couldn’t anymore.”
Source: A Thousand Cuts