Interconnections Quotes

“Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“Systemic disruption requires us to accept that there may be no measurable data to fully substantiate our understanding of those disruptions. Imaging and exploring the multiplicity of potential futures which may arise from disruptions is a creative exercise, not a number-crunching one.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“One must keep one's eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause. Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We do well to specialize, but we do not do well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressions—or without the application of that knowledge.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Those who are willing to work for change, and make changes, too often do so only for the sake of their own liberation, without much thought to the oppression of others—especially other species.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices