Tricia Friedman > Tricia's Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“Digital connectivity alters the architecture of connectivity across an entire society even when much of it is not yet connected. People on Facebook (more than four million Egyptians around the time of the January 25, 2011, uprising) communicate with those who are not on the site by sharing what they saw online with friends and family through other means: face-to-face conversation, texting, or telephone.27 Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was online, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversations among people who had never been on the site. The internet’s earliest adopters”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“This is far from the only such example. Michael Anti is a Chinese journalist and a former reporter for the Beijing bureau of the New York Times who goes by that name in his offline life. He was awarded fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge, and is well known as a democracy activist. Anti specializes in using new media to write about Chinese censorship.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“The significance of language or the issue of gendered language prompted Cambridge University Press to monitor the reporting narrative of sports coverage during Rio 2016.25 The research, led by Sarah Grieves, revealed that not only were female athletes much more likely to be discussed either in the context of their appearance or relationship status (married, mother, engaged), when it came to the discussion of their performance women were subject to much more neutral language (compete, participate), whereas men’s performance was characterised in much more heroic terms (dominate, battle, mastermind).26”
― Rachel Pashley, New Female Tribes

“What ideas have you contributed that have made a difference? How have you collaborated with others to build ideas?”
― Amantha Imber, The Innovation Formula: The 14 Science-Based Keys for Creating a Culture Where Innovation Thrives

“​Identify conditions, not culprits. ‘We have a ground rule that the purpose of a post-mortem is to find out what happened and how to make it better, not to find a person to blame', Dickerson told Business Insider Australia. ‘As a result, what we've seen is a company that's learning and moving faster.' Therefore, the goal is to find out how the mistake happened,”
― Amantha Imber, The Innovation Formula: The 14 Science-Based Keys for Creating a Culture Where Innovation Thrives

“You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition. If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane. Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it. That is not to say we allow it to prevent us from reaching our ultimate destination. But it does change the way we travel to get there and the duration of the trip.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage

“As the Haitian proverb puts it: Behind mountains are more mountains. Elysium is a myth. One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. On the contrary, the more you accomplish, the more things will stand in your way. There are always more obstacles, bigger challenges. You’re always fighting uphill. Get used to it and train accordingly. Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage

“In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too.”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“What would happen if we all cut our meat consumption just by fifty percent? Or if we got our electricity down by twenty percent? Or bought fifty percent less ‘stuff’? If somebody just does it on their own, you think, what difference will it make? But if whole communities do it—if the entire population lived differently—it changes the system. There is so much power in actions like lifestyle change because not only does it cut pollution, it also helps you to find your voice.”
― Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: A Man-Made Problem With a Feminist Solution

“Leadership is volunteering at the local school, speaking encouraging words to a friend, and holding the hand of a dying parent. It’s tying dirty shoelaces and going to therapy and saying to our families and friends: No. We don’t do unkindness here. It’s signing up to run for the school board and it’s driving that single mom’s kid home from practice and it’s creating boundaries that prove to the world that you value yourself. Leadership is taking care of yourself and empowering others to do the same.”
― Abby Wambach, WOLFPACK: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game

“We live as in a walled garden now, walled by ourselves. We have been building this wall for some time, but now it’s complete. That is new. And yet our surroundings remain as radiantly mysterious as ever.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“Black feminists and LGBTQ activists are labeled “hijackers” and said to be divisive or co-opting or distracting from what is important, and what is “important” is the mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women).”
― Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.”
― Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“And the metaphorical lenses we choose are crucial, having the power to magnify, create better focus, and correct our vision.”
― Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“One could argue that people can only teach what they know. Or, looking at it from a different perspective, at some point we all lack knowledge about something until we choose or are forced to learn. Anyone committed to collective liberation must acknowledge ignorance and take up the work of comprehensive political education. For example, I have been out of my depth on disability justice and climate change, to name two topics, and so I follow the lead of people who are more knowledgeable. But this doesn’t let me off the hook: I still need to seek out knowledge on my own about these issues.”
― Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“We can appreciate the choices we need to make with objective eyes; we can vent our frustrations; sort out our confusions; untangle a web of lies even. All so that we can find our way to a much larger story. One that we control consciously now, with our eyes wide open. Through stories our true character is revealed, or transformed in the process, like the refining away of the dross in order to make gold.”
― Bobette Buster, Do Story: How to tell your story so the world listens

“Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin (Semiotext

“I want writers to write books because they are committed to the content of those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I want writers to write books that can make a difference in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to write books that are worth being jailed for, worth fighting for, and should it come to that in this country, worth dying for.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin (Semiotext

“When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Rather than use what you see as unique about yourself as an exemption from further examination, a more fruitful approach would be to ask yourself, “I am white and I have had X experience. How did X shape me as a result of also being white?” Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in which we live; individualism will not. For now, try to let go of your individual narrative and grapple with the collective messages we all receive as members of a larger shared culture.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“If, for example, we look at the racial breakdown of the people who control our institutions, we see telling numbers in 2016–2017: • Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world) • US Congress: 90 percent white • US governors: 96 percent white • Top military advisers: 100 percent white • President and vice president: 100 percent white • US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white • Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white • People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white • People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white • People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white • People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white • People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white • Teachers: 82 percent white • Full-time college professors: 84 percent white • Owners of men’s professional football teams: 97 percent white26 These numbers are not describing minor organizations.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“THERE’S SOMETHING IMPORTANT that the moment of stopping to listen has in common with the labyrinthine quality of attention-holding architecture: in their own ways, each enacts some kind of interruption, a removal from the sphere of familiarity. Every time I see or hear an unusual bird, time stops, and later I wonder where I was, just as wandering some unexpected secret passageway can feel like dropping out of linear time. Even if brief or momentary, these places and moments are retreats, and like longer retreats, they affect the way we see everyday life when we do come back to it.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“I’m reminded of a 1991 lecture by John Cleese (of Monty Python) on creativity, in which two of the five required factors he lists are time: 1. Space 2. Time 3. Time 4. Confidence 5. A 22 inch waist Humor9”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”23 Unfortunately, our constant engagement with the attention economy means that this is something many of us (myself included) may have to relearn. Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“LGBTQ resilience—what’s it all about? It’s about coming out to yourself and then coming out to others, on your own timeline. It’s about recognizing the evolution of gender and sexuality across your lifetime—who you are today may change over time, and that’s something to stand up for.”
― Anneliese A. Singh, The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook: Skills for Navigating Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression