#so

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

At an age when most children are playing hopscotch or with their dolls,you, poor child, who had no friends or toys, you toyed with dreams of murder, because that is a game to play alone. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#murder #age

With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight. ↗

— Chris Bohjalian

#experience #life-lessons #maturity #age

A Arte é, com efeito, o aperfeiçoamento subjectivo da vida. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#filosofia #art

Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#insight #intelligence #philosophy #tolerance #wisdom

Depression is a red herring," said Nariman. "I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future. ↗

— Rohinton Mistry

#memories #philosophical #age

The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment’s innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept. ↗

— Louis Dupre

#natural-law #social-history #age

Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past. ↗

— Savitri Devi

#ra #source #truth #age

...the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us. ↗

— Moxie Mezcal

#age

Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn’t conscious; it’s Pavlovian. (13) ↗

— Victoria Moran

#media #society #women #youth-culture #age