Some quotes to start the year
Wednesday, January 01, 2025
Happy 2025!
Thursday, December 26, 2024
Power, Knowledge, and the Radical Act of Resolve
maintain themselves, and how disrupting these systems requires critical awareness (of power's mechanisms) and a refusal to succumb to despair—actively reclaiming agency and insisting on change.
Quotes
"Once in power, fascist regimes confiscated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews."
(Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism)
"Because power is knowledge, and power above all else seeks to sustain itself, we can see that the rhetoric around development knowledge—‘like light’—is not just optimistic but also clearly wildly inaccurate."
(Ben Ramalingam, Aid on the Edge of Chaos)
"Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy with a large population of people who think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience. What’s really radical is being willing to look right at the magnitude and difficulty of the problems we face and still insist that we can solve those problems."
(Sam Daley-Harris Jan. 16, Transformational Advocacy and the Disobedient Self)
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
Quotes for Wednesday, December 4th – December the 4th be with you.
Good happy December 4. Everyone, Wednesday, midweek, all these awesome aspects about the day. It's a short week for me. I'll be out of the office Thursday and Friday. So, really, today is my Friday.
Unlike yesterday, today, there were a lot of great quotes in my feed and I share a subset that resonated for me.
Quotes
– Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder
"Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success."
– sfgate.com, Self-Control Is the Key to Success (I know, an odd source, but that is what my app (readwise) captured. If interested, search the title.
"The key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems, not in optimizing isolated components of the system."
– Brian Walker PhD, Resilience Thinking
"When it comes to the long run, researchers struggle to find any measurable connection between our intentions and our actual behaviour"
– Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes
"It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing."
– Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings, and Albert R. Hibbs, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (The cite is almost as long as the quote!)
"This book will show that while economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has."
– Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Why Nations Fail


