Artemis > Artemis's Quotes

“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.
The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.
In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.
A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”
Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.
This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.
After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?
What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.
It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.
“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”
They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.”
― Russell Brand

“We are told by drug warriors that the enemy in the war is a thing – drugs – not a group of people, but the facts prove otherwise.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“To deny the individual agency of those caught up in the system – their capacity to overcome seemingly impossible odds – would be to deny an essential element of their humanity.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Rather than shaming and condemning an already deeply stigmatized group, we, collectively, can embrace them – not necessarily their behavior, but them – their humanness. As the saying goes, ‘you gotta hate the crime, but love the criminal.’ This is not a mere platitude; it is a prescription for liberation.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“More African American adults are under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Felon disenfranchisement laws have been more effective in eliminating black voters in the age of mass incarceration than they were under Jim Crow…These figures may understate the impact of felony disenfranchisement, because they do not take into account the millions of ex-felons who cannot vote in states that require ex-felons to pay fines or fees before their voting rights can be restored – the new poll tax.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer permissible to hate blacks, but we can hate criminals.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Although it is common to think of Jim Crow as an explicitly race-based system, in fact a number of the key policies were officially colorblind. As previously noted, poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfranchisement laws were all formally race-neutral practices that were employed in order to avoid the prohibition on race discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth Amendment. The laws operated to create an all-white electorate because they excluded African Americans from the franchise but were not generally applied to whites.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The notion that racial caste systems are necessarily predicated on a desire to harm other racial groups, and that racial hostility is the essence of racism, is fundamentally misguided. Even slavery does not conform to this limited understanding of racism and racial caste. Most plantation owners supported the institution of black slavery not because of a sadistic desire to harm blacks but instead because they wanted to get rich, and black slavery was the most efficient means to that end. By and large, plantation owners were indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery; they were motivated by greed. Preoccupation with the role of racial hostility in earlier caste systems can blind us to the ways in which every caste system, including mass incarceration, has been supported by racial indifference – a lack of caring and compassion for people of other races.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Even beyond private prison companies, a whole range of prison profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration is to be undone, including phone companies that gouge families of prisoners by charging them exorbitant rates to communicate with their loved ones; gun manufacturers that sell Taser guns, rifles, and pistols to prison guards and police; private health care providers contracted by the state to provide (typically abysmal) health care to prisoners; the U.S. Military, which relies on prison labor to provide military gear to soldiers in Iraq; corporations that use prison labor to avoid paying decent wages; and the politicians, laywers, and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons often in predominantly white rural communities – deals that often promise far more to local communities than they deliver.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate…if the caste dimensions of mas incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“No task is more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”
― Russell Brand

“Pope was only 26 years years old and now he’s dead and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. All he did was break his fucking foot, he wasn’t supposed to die when we left him in Dallas. He was supposed to have surgery, get his cast, and be back out on the road with us by summer. It was the insurance-provided assisted living doctors that killed him. They told him he was schizophrenic. Started feeding him psychiatric drugs. They over-medicated him. Too many pills. His bbody couldn’t take it. He wasn’t crazy. He just wasn’t meant for Texas. They won’t release any of his records to us, only to family. Pope didn’t have much family left, just his older brother and grandmother. He told us all his parents were dead. It wasn’t until after Pope died we found out his father was still alive. None of them are going to chase this. I feel responsible. We left him. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. It was just a broken foot, a busted ankle. Heather had been talking to him while he was in the hospital. He told him to come stay with us. He was incoherent whenever I’d hear from him. It was like you could tell the drugs were kicking in. I was too self-obsessed to care, too focused on my failing career. Too busy being full of shit and uninspired. To fucking original. So fucking wasted. It’s a rare thing to meet someone out on the road that you connect with. It’s such a rare and beautiful thing to find a true friend out there on the road. I failed him. Pope, I’m sorry, so very sorry.”
― Laura Jane Grace

“I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, ‘What do you mean by knowledge?’ From an epistemological perspective this may be a thorny issue, but I maintain that, if there were a better alternative, someone would have presented it. Had I presented that same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“I cannot overstress the importance of the fact that, once gravity is included in our considerations of nature, one is no longer free to define the total energy of a system arbitrarily, nor the fact that there are both positive and negative contributions to this energy…I say this because it have been argued that the statement that the average total Newtonian gravitational energy in a flat, expanding universe is arbitrary, and that any other balue would be just as good, but that scientists ‘define’ the zero point to argue against God. So claimed Dinesh D’Souza, anyway, in his debates with Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“Why is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately, this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue. ‘Something’ may always come from nothing. It may be required, independent of the underlying nature of reality. Or perhaps ‘something’ may not be very special or even very common in the multiverse. Either way, what is really useful is not pondering this question, but rather participating in the exciting voyage of discovery that may reveal specifically how the universe in which we lived evolved and is evolving and the processes that ultimately operationally govern our existence. That is why we have science. We may supplement this understanding with reflection and call that philosophy. But only via continuing to probe every nook and cranny of the universe that is accessible to us will we truly build a useful appreciation of our own place in the universe.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“We have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing – involving the absence of space itself – and which one day may return to nothing via processes that may not be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction. In this sense, science, as Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of the imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“Freud had a word for such reenactments: ‘The compulsion to repeat.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“The social environment interacts with brain chemistry. Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“While reliving trauma is dramatic, frightening, and potentially self-destructive, over time a lack of presence can be even more damaging. This is a particular problem with traumatized children. The acting-out kids tend to get attention; the blanked-out ones don’t bother anybody and are left to lose their future bit by bit.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“In 1994 Stephen Porges, who was a researcher at the University of Maryland at the time we started our investigation of HRV, and who is now at the University of North Carolina, introduced the Polyvagal theory, which built on Darwin’s observations and added another 140 years of scientific discoveries to those early insights. (Polyvagal refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve – Darwin’s “pneumogastric nerve” – which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines.) The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states.
In short, Porges’s theory made us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and center in our understanding of trauma. It also suggested new approaches to healing that focus on strengthening the body’s system for regulating arousal.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk

“Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while other are too numb to absorb new experiences – or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, [quoting Donald Winnicott] ‘the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.’ Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust it its caregiver’s needs, means the child perceives that ‘something is wrong’ with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse…[citing two related studies in 1996 and 2003 led by Karlen Lyons-Ruth] Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults…Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to known and to see.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers

“Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. One of my patients told me, ‘It is like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs.’ Nothing feels safe – least of all your own body.”
― Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers