"“For two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants.” —Martin Luther King Jr., in a 1965 Playboy interview with Alex Haley"
"Though President Donald Trump has spent his career boasting of his wealth, he claimed in the 1990s that outfitting apartments in his residential high-rise buildings with sprinkler systems would be too expensive—and lobbied against regulations that may have been able to save the life of a man who was killed in a"
"Consider, for example, the following quiz posted to Facebook by San Benito Tire Pros, a tire and auto repair shop in California. It asks Facebook users, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift …
"How did we get into this preposterous mess? Answering this question requires an understanding of (among other things) the peculiar nature of digital technology, the ideology of Silicon Valley, the astonishing political naivety of Zuckerberg, the ethical tunnel vision of software engineers and – most important – the business model that has come to be known as “surveillance capitalism”."
"Harlan Ellison is probably one of the best writers of the last century, but he may be more famous (or infamous) for his irascibility, his lawsuits, and his reputed bad behavior."
"I called Mark Zuckerberg a modern-day colonizer, and it made some international news. After a couple of weeks of these headlines and the two sides going back and forth, he dropped the lawsuit. We did …
"There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even …
"We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world.
| Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine"