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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Max Brooks
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June 26 - July 2, 2020
Jean-Jacques Rousseau—not be confused with Henry David Thoreau as Dan did that night—was an eighteenth-century French philosopher. He believed that early humans were essentially good, but when humanity began to urbanize, separating themselves from nature, they separated from their own nature as well. In Reinhardt’s words, the “ills of today can all be traced to the corruption of civilization.”
Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.
It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.
All animals are competitive by nature and cooperate only under specific circumstances and for specific reasons, not because of a desire to be nice to one another. —FRANS DE WAAL, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”
“Need. That’s what makes a village. That’s what we are now, and what holds us together is need. I won’t help you if you don’t help me. That is the social contract.”
Violence, as unpleasant as it may seem, fulfills a necessary social function in chimpanzees. —ANDREW R. HALLORAN, The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees
People are the problem. Nature is your friend.
a theory once that if aliens ever do come calling, they may very well be hostile, because the same brains that mastered spaceflight learned to think by hunting.
When meat is available, it is treated as a valuable resource; bonobos have been observed to beg the meat holder for a share. —From World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation, edited by JULIAN CALDECOTT and LERA MILES
“El hambre es la mejor salsa.” Hunger is the best sauce!
saying from the Raj: “If the Indians all pissed at once, the British would be washed out to sea.”
“An open hand works when the alternative is a fist.”
Quoting Einstein, Alex said, “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
“I’m not saying war is good! And I’m not saying that going around the world attacking people is right. It’s not! It’s a last resort, always! If there’s any other way to solve problems, any way to avoid bloodshed…but when they’re coming for you, when you know they’re coming, when they won’t listen and it’s too late to even run, you have to defend yourself. You have to fight!”
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. —LEON C. MEGGINSON, professor of management and marketing at Louisiana State University, 1963
