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If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear one hundred battles. If you know yourself and not your enemy, you will lose as often as you win. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, will never know victory.

one person leaves tracks but two people leave trails

Las discrepancias en la red con réplicas sarcásticas y subtuits se volvían mucho menos drásticas en persona. Los sistemas de valores que en un hilo de comentarios parecían incompatibles hallaban una conciliación inmediata en torno a la mesa de un bar. Allí no parecían tan impregnados de machismo tóxico, de eurocentrismo, de privilegio. La discusión bajaba de tono con un comentario gracioso y otra ronda para todos.

Vivían dos vidas. Por un lado, la realidad tangible, que los rodeaba; por el otro, las imágenes. También ellas los rodeaban.

los habían acogido con una curiosidad y una apertura que a veces parecían sospechosas, síntomas de una soledad de la que todos querían deshacerse. Nunca habrían sabido cómo pedir ayuda a esos amigos en caso de necesidad. Había asuntos de los que nunca hablaban, por ejemplo, el dinero.

Los círculos cerrados incitaban al cotilleo; el conformismo creaba un sistema de expectativas que los hacía sentirse oprimidos. Entre todas aquellas personas idénticas entre sí, (…) sentían que les faltaba la libertad para ser ellos mismos, o sea, para reinventarse, o sea, para ser diferentes a ellos mismos.

habían crecido con un horizonte de ideas en el que la individualidad se manifestaba a través de un esquema de diferencias visuales, inmediatamente descifrables y en continua renovación.

La atención a la belleza y al deleite parece disuelta en la cotidianidad como un granulado en suspensión.

It was only afterward, when I thought about it, that I realized he had actually looked really unhappy as he said this. Not like a man who had finally worked out he could not live without his girlfriend close by him, and wanted to make a joyous union of our two lives. He looked like someone who felt outmaneuvered.

Mrs. Traynor seemed like the kind of woman whose gaze turned capable hands into fingers and thumbs.

The extinction of species was proceeding much faster than anybody recognized, and the publicized lists of “endangered” species told only a fraction of the story; the disaster extended all the way down the animal phyla to insects, worms, and mosses.

A clearing rate of fifty acres a minute meant that plant and animal species were becoming extinct at the incredible rate of one species per hour. Life forms that had evolved for millions of years were being wiped out every few minutes, and no one could predict the consequences of this stupendous rate of destruction.

The rain forests of the world had circled the equator in a green belt for at least sixty million years-but man would have cleared them within twenty years.

She was not fooled by the luxuriant, oversized vegetation, which she knew represented an extraordinarily efficient ecosystem built in virtually barren soil.
The developing nations of the world did not understand this fact; once cleared, the jungle soil yielded disappointing crops.

Studies show, (…) that the single greatest factor limiting work efficiency is ambient temperature, with sleep deprivation as the second factor.

In 1978, for each new automobile that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines, the cost of worker health benefits exceeded the cost of all the steel used to build the car.

the courts hesitated to interfere with animal experimentation. As a practical matter, researchers were free to do as they wished. The volume of animal research was extraordinary: during the 1970s, sixty-four million animals were killed in experiments in the United States each year.

La realidad imprime a cada uno una marca indeleble. Cada era impone corsés invisibles a todo aquel que le toca vivirla, y yo solo puedo bailar con estas cadenas puestas.

Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto.

Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people,” a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.

if you Google ‘female careerism,’ you get a bunch of links, but if you Google ‘male careerism,’ Google asks if you really meant ‘male careers’ or even ‘mahle careers.’ ‘Careerism’—the pathological need to have paid employment—is an affliction that only affects women, apparently.

Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge and they are never ignorant again. (Some ancient cultures thanked Eve for making us fully human and conscious.)
62

... and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, ....

The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.

“The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow (...) We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”
Virginia Woolf

“several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
John Keats

“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future”
Laurence Gonzalez

you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.