A core concept of evolution is that the strongest and fittest survive, but moreover, communities survive better than individuals. Communities can rely on cooperation, and I think that’s the concept of goodness. Evolution relies on the concept of mutual benefit and the extension of generosity.

Michael Pollen, Fantastic Fungi

Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table

Richard Powers, Playground

One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

Alison Espach, The Wedding People (Phoebe)

It’s not mere talent that rises to the top, it’s persistence. 

Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

While change does always involve loss, not changing involves a much deeper loss 

Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

Your crown has been bought and paid for, all you have to do is wear it

James Baldwin

Man named Honi, comes across old man planting Carab tree. Asks how long until it bears fruit, old man answers 40 years. Why plant it? As a kid, old man played under shade of carob tree, planting for next generation.

Plant Carob trees whose shade you will never know.

Story from the Talmud on Cathedral Thinking

It’s not liking eachother that drives performance, it’s high performance that causes people to get along

Adam Grant, Building Teams that don’t Suck

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play

James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw

Richard Powers, Playground (Todd Keane)

If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into the other.

Richard Powers, Playground (Roti)

You can’t control grief by subtracting joy from your life

Katherine Morgan Schaffer, Perfectionists Guide to Losing Control

When you operate from an intentional space, the primary source of reward lies in honoring the intention, not in getting credit for it

Katherine Morgan Schaffer, Perfectionists Guide to Losing Control

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Jane Goodall

Don’t think about the roof and then stop building the houses foundation. There is no clean hydrogen without renewable power

Rama Adib, REN21

I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious

Albert Einstein

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

Dr Martin Luther King

Capitalism wants growth, once you stop growing, and start shrinking, even just by a little bit, even if you’re a huge industry, we start to turn on your demise.

Unknown

The history of the world, my sweet-is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat

Stephen Sondheim

Most social problems are complicated, of course, but a retreat into complexity is more often a reflection of our social standing than evidence of critical intelligence. Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

Competition breeds choice, and choice makes exploitation difficult

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought”

Walter Brueggemann 

It is not easy for us to conceive that there may have been a time, within a smaller and more integrated community, when it appeared to be “unnatural” that any man should profit from the necessities of others, and when it was assumed that, in time of dearth, prices of “necessities” should remain at a customary level, even though there might be less all round.

EP Thompson, A Moral Economy

I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

When goods cross borders, armies rarely do

Fred Smith, FedEx CEO

What we wind up with is someone who is perfectly designed to stick it to us

Daniel Oppenheimer, NYT, about marriage

Why do you rob banks? “Because that’s where the money is!”

Willie Sutton

The depression heralded a new normal, a mature American cannot expect the torrid growth of an expanding America-

Alvin Hanson

Simply too hard to build trust without nearness. Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow.

Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO

Energy is the nucleus of wealth

Ezra Klein, Abundance

Progress often requires the focusing mechanism of disaster …Leaders define what counts as a crisis, and they are the ones who choose what to focus on.

Ezra Klein, Abundance

The purpose of a system is what it does. If an outcome recurs again and again across time and place, it is the result of choices that became rules, which means it is the result of ideas and movements.

Ezra Klein, Abundance

There’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the bad faith of believing yourself trapped, than to face the dizzying realities of your freedom

Jean-Paul Satre

I had this probably crazy feeling that nothing’s going to hurt me, I’m meant to be here

Jane Goodall on living in the African bush among chimps

This highly developed intellect means we have a responsibility to the other creatures in this world who are subject to the thoughtless actions of human being

Jane Goodall

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook

William James

It no longer matters whether a story is important, so long as it is compelling

Oliver Burkeman on news/social media, value of attention

Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future of uncertainties, we strip each moment of calm, its intrinsic importance which we are to enjoy, so the future destroys the present”

Hannah Arendt

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

You cry, old man, every tear you cry is one that I don’t have to

Terri Real

People with simple ideas will not have a hard time getting an audience, but these are carnival workers who are leading our young men down the path of suicide

Terri Real on pro-masculinity podcasts

When you want to accomplish something, you shouldn’t attack your arch enemy, but your lazy friend

Ralph Nader (via Moral Ambition)

The realistic are rarely idealistic, and the idealists are rarely realistic. What we really need is some realistic idealists

Dr. Martin Luther King

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities

Dumbledore

I find out what the world needs, then I go out and try to invent it

Thomas Edison

The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined

Stephen Pinker

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead trouble makers

Marshall McLuhan 

One of the most difficult things, is not to change society, but to change yourself

Nelson Mandela

All men are to work the earth, and in this sense each man is appointed to bring forth creations possibilities to help perfect the world and build it into what it could be, and that begins in his own soul

Josh Hawley, Manhood, quoting the Bible

Our species is very bad at changing our behavior, we’re very bad at being nice to eachother, but we’re pretty good at inventing stuff

Michael Grunwald

Food is the ultimate hard to abate sector. While fossil fuels are now mostly a political test, the eating the earth problem is still an intellectual test, it’s a puzzle

Michael Grunwald

The only difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you’re not doing

PJ Finley Jr.

Books well used are among the best of things, and poorly used are among the worst

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love going rock climbing. That’s really the goal of parenting is to help your kid find something that they’re that psyched about, something they can commit to, that’ll drive them, that they’re passionate about.

Alex Honnold

We’ve been autistic to the earth for centuries

Thomas Berry

Sustainability really may not be enough at this time. What sustainability alludes to is finding an equilibrium between what you use of the earth’s resources and what you put back. In fact there’s been so much damage done over the last several decades especially that what we need to embark upon now is a strategy of restoration, how we give back more than we take.

Nina Simons

It’s human to make mistakes, it’s not human to go on enjoying the mistakes

Maladom Asone

They didn’t need the filters and regulation because they had taken them out of the pipes and put them in the designers head where they should’ve been. This is an archetype of a coming industrial world where environmental regulation will become an anachronism, companies that need it won’t be profitable.

Hunter Lovins 

The first thing that you have to do is change the dream. Change from the materialistic to an earth honoring dream, this can happen in a generation.

Amazonian Medicine Man via John Perkins 

Beware the barrenness of a busy life

Socrates 

For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two. One the city of the poor, the other for the rich. These are at war with each other

Plato

Markets can fund speed and innovation, but they can’t replace accountability, transparency, or long-term vision

Abigail Bassett

Now is better than new, time is better than tech when considering climate solutions

Jon Foley, Project Drawdown

Operating outside of the things that you want to be doing is inherently energy draining

Robert Glazer

Being in the game is the prize

Rupaul

Ideas tested against market reality early become resilient. Ideas perfected in isolation typically become irrelevant.

Aaron Bernstein

Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts

Winston Churchill

Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you

Aldous Huxley

If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with other humans

David Brooks, How to Know a Person

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers

Pope Paul VI

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness. The privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of the other

David White

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease

Voltaire

I still believe in regulation and that there is such a thing as the public good and don’t believe the market can or should provide everything

Paulina Borsook

The essence of evil is the tendency to obliterate the humanity of another

David Brooks, How to Know a Person

If I screw up raising my kids, nothing I achieve will matter much

Tom Baker, Cheaper by the Dozen

Attention is not neutral. It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful, the act through which we bind facts into cares

Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making

I am human, and nothing human is alien to me

Terence

Attention is sometimes an act. But it is first an instinct. This is why even the most basic attempt at mindfulness — watching 10 breaths go by, without your attention wandering — requires such concentration. Algorithmic media companies exploit the difference between our attentional instincts and aspirations. In so doing, they make it harder for us to become who we might wish to be.

Ezra Klein

If the present technological age has a lasting gift for us, it is to urge as decisive the question of what human beings are for.

Antón Barba-Kay

If you find what is sacred to a person, there you will find rampant irrationality

Jonathan Height

In love’s service, only the wounded can serve

Thornton Wilder