Bridget Graber > Bridget's Quotes

“Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“When we function thinking only of ourselves and believing we can do it alone, we create harm and create a container for more exhaustion.”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

“If you really loved someone, it would emanate from you, sincere and overflowing, generous and unconditional. But for me, my father’s love had always been conditional. Here again was just another condition: In order for me to love you, I need you to write out a list. Why should I have to teach my father how to love me? And, I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t make the list because I was afraid. Afraid that even if I wrote out everything I needed, and he gave me all of it, spent all of his time, money, and energy trying to make things right, I would still be too afraid to love him back. I wouldn’t be able to forgive. And then it wouldn’t be him who was the real asshole. Not anymore. Then it would be me.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“This cannot help affecting the body: after all, if you go through life being stressed while not knowing you are stressed, there is little you can do to protect yourself from the long-term physiological consequences.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Our lives are tangibly impacted in countless ways—not only by things beyond our control but also by the relentless irrationality of the world.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back. The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, and that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profits for capital.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The idea that the work is provided for love serves to paper over the fact that sometimes workers have needs that cannot or should not be subsumed by those of the people they serve.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“But the “consumers” of nonprofits’ services are, in this model, the funders rather than the people being served. Nonprofits wind up structured like little corporations, with workers under a kind of pressure to produce that mimics the pressure of the assembly line.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.”
― Hilary Leichter, Temporary

“In other words, the halo effect of the industry prevents people from seeing—or acting upon—problems that may exist within it. When workplace issues crop up, such as undercompensation, racism, or sexism, they are seen as isolated incidents rather than systemic flaws.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“At the organization level, generous vacation policies and wellness benefits without a reduction in the amount of work managers expect from workers do little to change the culture.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency. The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“felt dizzied by a sudden sweeping understanding of our collective grief—kids ripped from their homes in Palestine, kids shot in the streets of Gaza and Houston and Rio, the greed, the oil, and guns—it was the same struggle everywhere.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“When it comes to defeating capitalism, I’m not so naïve as to think we can win. Not how you think. Not decisively, for all time. All our protests, all our organizing, they can’t defeat the tanks and gas and guns and greed machines—at least not forever, not right now. So what I think, these days, is you have to accept that there’s no winning, and learn to live for the joy of the struggle. And for maybe. Maybe someday.”
― Sim Kern, The Free People's Village

“In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier.”
― Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia

“You had to pause in the face of reflex, ask yourself if the narrative you attached to the knee-jerk was accurate. Once she’d grasped this, she could never again see life as a static thing, something with one immutable definition. The universe was not an object. It was a beam of light, and the colours that it split into changed depending on whose eyes were doing the looking. Nothing could be taken at face value. Everything had hidden facets, hidden depths that could be interpreted a thousand ways – or misinterpreted in the same manner. Reflexes kept a person safe, but they could also make you stupid.”
― Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

“War was ugly, exhausting, and above all else, tedious – an odd thing to say about a situation in which there were more explosions and adrenaline than you knew what to do with. But for all the strategising, for all the narrow escapes and near misses, when you boiled it down, war was nothing more than an argument in which no one had landed on a better solution than killing each other.”
― Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

“At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“After all, a society that takes care of its own does not produce children who grow up dreaming of burning it down.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Heavenly Tyrant

“Dependence on care has been pathologised, rather than recognised as part of our human condition.”
― The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence