Nat

“Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. "Critical thinking" may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa

“The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States—so why would it suddenly be today?”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie