Here be this month’s collection of recently unearthed quotes, amusing and thought-provoking …
Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fish-hooks or clay pots or grinding stones.
But no.
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in ancient culture was a femur that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.
[Aleta Pearce on Twitter; 20 March 2020]
One cannot usefully legislate against an attitude or a belief, but one can legislate against criminal behaviour that might result from an attitude or a belief. Strong human rights protection in constitutions and laws [are] mechanisms to contain extremist tendencies.
[William Saunderson-Meyer; Thought Leader]
It is the duty of governments to protect their citizens from harm. It is not government’s task to protect its citizens’ sensitivities, however justifiable and acute, from peacefully expressed views, however bizarre.
[William Saunderson-Meyer; Thought Leader]
To censor thought or opinion is to limit our understanding of the world. If one cannot look critically at … historical events, the past remains frozen at an officially sanctioned moment in time. For history to credibly illuminate the present, it has to be open to continual academic revision.
[William Saunderson-Meyer; Thought Leader]
To help us all work together, remember that you have created your own reality and so has every other person you meet. Be willing to be curious about their story and to reflect on why this might be different to yours. Better still, try considering what you really know about the current situation and use this information to create several different stories.
[Prof. Patricia Riddell; The Conversation]
The whole experience of paying someone to inflict pain on you by pulling your pubic hair out by the roots is undeniably bizarre – but it’s also completely normalized and a fairly regular part of grooming for lots of women in the developed West. In plenty of cultures, pubic hair is seen as a symbol of fertility – some women in South Korea even have hair transplants on their vulvas, so celebrated is a thick and full bush.
[Lynn Enright; Vagina: A Re-Education]
Over tens of thousands of words, I have argued that we should all be much more open, much more honest, much more vocal about our vaginas and our vulvas and our genitals generally.
[Lynn Enright; Vagina: A Re-Education]
The virus doesn’t move, people move it. We stop moving, the virus stops moving, the virus dies. It’s that simple.
Sourdough starters are just Tamagotchi for early middle-age.
[Eric Lach on Twitter]
Having a great deal of expertise in one field does not prevent you from being a crackpot or menace in another. Let your studies teach you humility and an appreciation for hard-won knowledge, not intellectual vanity.
[Katie Mack on Twitter]
“The sun’s coming back again,” Moomintroll thought in great excitement. “No darkness, no loneliness any more. Once again I’ll sit in the sun on the verandah and feel my back warming …”
[Tove Jansson; Moominland Midwinter]
If Buddhism is true, it’s true because it offers us a way to take a look at a truth that existed before there was any Buddhism. If it doesn’t do that, then there is no reason to study Buddhism except, perhaps, as an academic discipline or a hobby. If Buddhism is all about believing in Buddhism, then Buddhism isn’t worth believing in.
[Brad Warner; Letters to a Dead Friend about Zen]
We can build peace through the revolution of small things, recognising the value of every human being … Yesterday, peace was our grandparents’ dream, today it is our responsibility to build it.
[Sophia Vinasco-Molina]
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Things are kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervenes but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact.
[George Orwell]
[The people] have abandoned the old, decent style of long, full garments for clothes which are short, tight, impractical, slashed, every part laced, strapped or buttoned up, with the sleeves of the gowns and the tippets of the hoods hanging down to absurd lengths … Women flowed with the tides of fashion in this and other things even more eagerly, wearing clothes that were so tight that they wore a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts at the back, to hide their arses.
[James Tait (ed), “Chronica Johannis de Reading et Anonymi Cantuariensis 1346-1367” in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death; quoted in Going Medieval blog]