Paul > Paul's Quotes

“One of the great challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is knowing when not to use them, when to rely on the powers of older and slower technologies, like paper and books.”
― The Penguin Press, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”
― Steven Wright

“If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?”
― John Wooden

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
― Will Durant

“We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“According to the ideology of individualism, race is irrelevant. Of course, we do occupy distinct race, gender, class, and other positions that profoundly shape our life chances in ways that are not natural, voluntary, or random; opportunity is not equally distributed across race, class, and gender. On some level, we know that Bill Gates’s son was born into a set of opportunities that will benefit him throughout his life, whether he is mediocre or exceptional. Yet even though Gates’s son has clearly been handed unearned advantage, we cling tightly to the ideology of individualism when asked to consider our own unearned advantages.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“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.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true? How does this lens change my understanding of racial dynamics? How can my unease help reveal the unexamined assumptions I have been making? Is it possible that because I am white, there are some racial dynamics that I can’t see? Am I willing to consider that possibility? If I am not willing to do so, then why not?”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The system of racism begins with ideology, which refers to the big ideas that are reinforced throughout society. From birth, we are conditioned into accepting and not questioning these ideas. Ideology is reinforced across society, for example, in schools and textbooks, political speeches, movies, advertising, holiday celebrations, and words and phrases. These ideas are also reinforced through social penalties when someone questions an ideology and through the limited availability of alternative ideas. Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence. 14 Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The good/ bad frame is a false dichotomy. All people hold prejudices, especially across racial lines in a society deeply divided by race. I can be told that everyone is equal by my parents, I can have friends of color, and I may not tell racist jokes. Yet I am still affected by the forces of racism as a member of a society in which racism is the bedrock. I will still be seen as white, treated as white, and experience life as a white person. My identity, personality, interests, and investments will develop from a white perspective. I will have a white worldview and a white frame of reference. In a society in which race clearly matters, our race profoundly shapes us.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“African Americans continue to be the most underrepresented group at the organizational leadership level. In 2018, affirmative action has all but been dismantled. Yet invariably, I will encounter a white male—bristling with umbrage—who raises the issue of affirmative action. It seems that we white people just cannot let go of our outrage over how unfair this toothless attempt to rectify centuries of injustice has been to us. And this umbrage consistently surfaces in overwhelmingly white leadership groups that have asked me to come in and help them recruit and retain more people of color.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“But perhaps most fundamentally, anti-blackness comes from deep guilt about what we have done and continue to do; the unbearable knowledge of our complicity with the profound torture of black people from past to present.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real. The dream is the “perfect world,” unpolluted by blacks. If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence. Yet they still must exist, for the existence of blacks provides the needed other against which whites may rise. Thus, white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real. The dream is the “perfect world,” unpolluted by blacks. If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence. Yet they still must exist, for the existence of blacks provides the needed other against which whites may rise. Thus, white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior status justifies for the white collective.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“To put it bluntly, I believe that the white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Carol Anderson, in her book White Rage, argues that “the trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White racial socialization engenders many conflicting feelings toward African Americans: benevolence, resentment, superiority, hatred, and guilt roil barely below the surface and erupt at the slightest breach, yet can never be explicitly acknowledged. Our need to deny the bewildering manifestations of anti-blackness that reside so close to the surface makes us irrational, and that irrationality is at the heart of white fragility and the pain it causes people of color.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again. White fragility keeps people of color in line and “in their place.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Your brain isn’t here to show you an honest picture of the world, or to make you happy. It’s not here to make rational decisions, or to help you advance up the corporate ladder. Your body spent the energy it takes to build something as powerful as your brain for one reason and one reason only: Your brain helps you survive on a planet that is often hostile to life.”
― Mike McHargue, You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

“But the ventral branch also runs to your heart and lungs, which means your brain stem, middle ear, heart, and diaphragm can respond to the tone of someone’s voice several seconds faster than the structures in your neocortex can process the content of their actual words. A sharp word can literally take your breath away. How we say something matters as much as what we say, because our automatic nervous system is listening and responding to tone long before our thinking brains get the message.”
― Mike McHargue, You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

“Researchers have found that heavy social media use increases depression risk by 27 percent, and heavy smartphone and tablet users are 35 percent more likely to have suicidal ideation. Far from providing late-night monologue material, our relationship to our devices has life-and-death stakes.”
― Mike McHargue, You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

“Theirs is a worldview in which anything and everything—government, politics, civic society, and law—can and should be disrupted. As Big Tech critic Jonathan Taplin once put it to me, “Demos—society itself—is often viewed as being ‘in the way.’ ”15”
― Rana Foroohar, Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us

“Excuse me,” I said. “We’re talking about all this like journalism is the only thing that matters, but isn’t this really about… democracy?” If newspapers and magazines are all driven out of business by Google or companies like it, I asked, how are people going to find out what’s going on?”
― Rana Foroohar, Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us

“But the trouble with Big Tech isn’t just an economic and business issue; it has political and cognitive implications as well.”
― Rana Foroohar, Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us