This month’s selection of quotes encountered.
In every way, the notion of women’s unsuitability didn’t just happen. It was systematically and consciously created. And, of course, another way of keeping women in their place is to insist that their minds just don’t allow them to inhabit traditional male bastions.
[Prof. Stephen Reicher]
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[George Orwell]
The most amazing thing about the human mind is that you literally never have to stop putting things into it; you can always learn more if you want to, and there is always more to learn.
[Katie Mack]
[T]here are parts of your own body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of Mars. Most researchers I talked to blamed this dearth of knowledge on the black-box problem: the female body is considered more complex, more obscure, with much of its plumbing tucked up inside. To get inside it, we’ve needed high-tech imaging tools, tools that have only come around in recent decades. When I heard these answers, I couldn’t help thinking of what science has done in the twenty-first century: put a rover on Mars, made a three-parent baby, built an artificial sheep uterus. And we couldn’t figure out the composition of vaginal mucus?
[Rachel Gross; Vagina Obscura]
For centuries, science has been treating women as walking wombs, baby machines and incubators of new life. This narrow perspective has prevented us from asking questions and making advancements that could help all of us live longer, healthier lives. It’s time for a paradigm shift. We need to finally see the female body for what it truly is: a powerful constellation of interlocking elements, each part indivisible from the whole, that work together to support our health from cradle to grave. As we fill in the missing parts of this picture, we will undoubtedly expand our understanding of all bodies.
[Rachel Gross; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/09/the-big-idea-why-we-need-to-rewrite-the-history-of-female-bodies]
We have the most profound and bizarre psychological block against providing assistance to people in need in cash. We insist against all evidence that they will mostly waste it. In fact cash is the single most practical, efficient and effective intervention for improving lives.
[Rory Stewart]
Listen carefully to everything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big.
[Catherine M Wallace]
Life. One long panic punctuated by cups of tea.
The goddess [Kali] symbolises, we are told, evil being cut away, hypocrisy undone, abusive powers crushed. I rather hoped the necklace of severed male heads she wears might be portraits of well-known oppressors, but no, they mostly look like Salvador Dalí.
[Marina Warner; https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/may/16/goddesses-marina-warner-volcanic-power-of-witches-she-devils-divinities-british-museum]