Simon

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: A Nobel Laureate's Fight Against Authoritarianism -- Includes an Introduction by Amal Clooney

“Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“History shows that in the absence of violent leveling events, inequality was commonly quite high relative to its theoretical maximum and could remain high for extended periods of time.”
― Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

“Literally, the grace & hesitation of
modal descent, the rhyme unbearable, the
coming down through the prepared delay and
once again we are there, beholding the
complete elation of our end.

Each move
into the home world is that same loss; we
do mimic the return and the pulse very
slightly quickens, as our motives flare in
the warm hearth. What I have is then already
lost, is so much there I can only come down
to it again, my life slips into music &
increasingly I cannot take much more of this.
The end cadence deferred like breathing, the
birthplace of the poet: all put out their lights
and take their instruments away with them.

How can we sustain such constant loss.”
― J.H. Prynne, The White Stones