“Good for justice, bad for Jones. I hope you get the bastard if that’s what the evidence shows.”
Source: Betrayal In Black
“Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“...high inequality is associated with higher rates of crime, greater risk of stress-related illness, and greater political polarization.”
Source: The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
“In my land, in the event of a divorce, the mother has the right to retain her children if they are still suckling. But in most cases, a mother maintains custody of daughters until a girl child reaches puberty. In the case of male children, the boy should be allowed to remain with his mother until he is seven. When he reaches his seventh birthday, he is supposed to have the option to choose between his mother or father. Generally it is accepted that the father have his sons at age seven. A son must go with his father at the age of puberty, regardless of the child's wishes. Often, in the case of male children, many fathers will not allow the mother to retain custody of a son, no matter what the age of the child.”
Source: Princess Sultana's Daughters
“The man who is respected merely for being the son of his father loses one of the normal incentives to useful effort. He is likely to develop views of life which attach undue importance to the accident of birth and to think that by merely existing he does enough to command respect. He believes himself rather better than other men and therefore becomes rather worse. All distinctions not based upon intrinsic merit have this bad effect upon character and on this ground, if on no other, deserve to be abolished,”
Source: Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35
“What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.”
Source: The Immoralist
“The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone's skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. [...] Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack of them as a white person are probably part of the problem.”
Source: Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
“Averages are no consolation to those who have been left behind.”
Source: The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
“A female who spoke her mind and called it like it was, was considered trouble. When a male did it, he was considered a leader and desirable.”
Source: Blood Shadow
“The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past.”
Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War