“You Deserve To Take Up Space.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“If we lie to the government, it’s a felony. But if they lie to us, it’s politics.” - Bill Murray

Illustration by Dave Merrell

“The search for life beyond Earth is not so much a search anymore if everything we are, we live on, interact with and observe is alive. Rather, it becomes an exploration of life’s expression of diversity and complexity– not in the universe but by the universe.” - Nathalie Cabrol

Painting by Simon Stalenhag.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-quantum-of-life/

“You experience it to be within your power to stop reading this paragraph. Apparently, you freely decided to continue. Perhaps you are curious how it will unfold. But you strongly sense that you could have done otherwise; you could have stopped reading (and you still can). However, from what we know about the laws of nature, it is not clear how the brain could control a neural process that would result in different outcomes when starting from the same brain state. It is also unclear how your interest in the contents of this paragraph led to the neural process that culminated in you reading it.” - Uri Maoz

Illustration by Paolo Uberti.

https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/uri-maoz

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

“Resistance and change begin in art.” - Ursula K Le Guin

Artwork by Fiona Staples in Saga.

Teenagers have been deformed by social media. There's a sense they fit, but not as agents, not as full human beings who are making a future for themselves. They fit as human fodder that has been sucked into a machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them, which is their attention. — Jonathan Haidt from Our Kids Are the Least Generation Flourishing We Know Of

Image by Bill Watterson

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jonathan-haidt.html

“The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.” - Mae Jemison 

Artwork by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. 

https://www.instagram.com/pamelaphatsimo/

“When we come to it We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth Have the power to fashion for this earth A climate where every man and every woman Can live freely without sanctimonious piety Without crippling fear

When we come to it We must confess that we are the possible We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world That is when, and only when We come to it.”

- Excerpt from Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth”

Artwork - Kerry James Marshall

"What if we are wrong about climate change, and we create a better world for nothing?" - Anonymous

“My mother never allowed me to be the nice girl. I’ve always walked into a room absolutely thinking I belonged.” - Shonda Rhimes

Photo MGM, Charlotte Greenwood, 1928.

Bill Moyers Question: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a tough book. It’s not Dispatches from Disneyworld. It paints some very stark portraits of poverty, despair, destructive behaviour. What makes you think people want to read that sort of thing these days?

Chris Hedges Answer: That’s not a question that Joe Sacco and I ever asked. It is absolutely imperative that we begin to understand what unfettered, unregulated capitalism does – the violence of that system.

Painting by Paco Pomet in Banksy’s Dismaland.