Below are the 32 books that I read during March and April of 2019 along with the most powerful quotes. The ratings are in parentheses and I have linked to an Amazon option for getting the book, but as always, check out cheaper (free?) options first.

If you are going to read just 2 books this year – or really in your entire life – I implore you to read “Just Mercy” and “The Coddling of the American Mind”. I cannot think of two books that are more powerful or that I enjoyed and learned more from than these two. Check out some of the quotes from these and the other books I read below. Enjoy!

1. Atheists in America (3) – 3/5/19      
   • “The constitution of the state of Mississippi (Article 14, section 265) states: ‘No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.’”
2. The Road to Character (3) – 3/9/19        
   • “[W]hile those who lead flat and unremarkable lives may avoid struggle, a well-lived life involves throwing oneself into struggle, that large parts of the most worthy lives are spent upon the rack, testing moral courage and facing opposition and ridicule, and that those who pursue struggle end up being happier than those who pursue pleasure.”        
   • “She came to feel she could achieve a state of grace not through surrender but through her own moral choices, by living a virtuous and rigorous life.”
   • “Love expands with use.”
   • “The first step to greatness is to be honest”
   • “he whose life has passed without contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence.”       
   • “A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?”
3. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (4) – 3/10/19       
   • “Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’”      
   • “To be exact, U.S. agribusinesses slaughter ten billion animals per year, and that’s not including the estimated ten billion fish and other sea animals that are killed annually. That’s 19,011 animals per minute, or 317 animals per second.” [2010]       
   • “In chapter 1, we did a thought experiment. We imagined that you were at a dinner party, eating a delicious meal, when your friends told you the stew contained dog meat. We explored your reactions to that, and then to the fact that your friend said she’d been joking and you were, in fact, eating beef.”        
   • [Talking about Chickens and Turkeys] “The birds’ severely shortened life span is due to their being fed a diet so full of growth-promoting drugs that they grow at a rate that’s equivalent of a human reaching 349 pounds by the age of two.”
   • “Though cows have a natural life span of approximately twenty years, after only four years in a dairy factory they are considered spent and sent to slaughter.”           
   • “One method used to catch fish is by dragging long nets…these nets result in massive amounts of ‘bycatch’ – captured animals other than those targeted. It is estimated that each year, over 30 million tons of sea animals, including birds, turtles, dolphins, and unwanted fish, are thrown back into the ocean, dead or dying;”
   • “‘Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored’ – Aldous Huxley”
   • “Meat production is a leading cause of every significant form of environmental damage: air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, erosion, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and depletion of fresh water.”        
   • “In 1996, [Oprah] Winfrey was sued for over $10 million by a group of Texas beef producers for libeling beef. At the height of the mad cow disease scare in Britain, when twenty people had died from eating what was believed to be tainted beef, Winfrey claimed, on the air, that she would not eat another burger. Under the ‘food libel laws,’ legislation that predated the Winfrey case and has been backed by agricultural corporations, it is illegal to criticize certain foods without ‘reasonable’ scientific evidence. So you might find that, when it comes to speaking out about the meat industry, some restrictions apply – most notably those on your First Amendment rights.”       
   • “‘Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’ – Albert Einstein”
   • “‘Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.’ – Helmut Kaplan”
4. The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (4) – 3/11/19
5. Climate Change Reality Check (1) – 3/12/19        
   • This book is full of questions that the author thinks are questions or issues that teardown climate change, but these issues have all been addressed in the scientific literature. Nothing worthwhile is in this book, though I am working on putting together the reasons why this book is worthless and hope to get around to writing the scientific data and explanations for this soon. In the meantime, please don’t read this junk…
6. Beyond Beliefs (2) – 3/16/19      
   • “We can respect the basic dignity of another even if we don’t respect what they do.”        
   • “in just one week, more farmed animals are killed than the total number of people killed in all wars throughout human history”
7. Girl, Wash Your Face (4) – 3/18/19     
   • “No, because I made a promise to myself and I don’t break those, not ever.”       
   • “When you really want something, you will find a way.”
   • “You should be the very first of your priorities! Are you getting enough sleep, enough water, the right nutrition? You cannot take care of others well if you’re not first taking care of yourself.”
8. Salt, Sugar, Fat (3) – 3/19/19        
   • Though I don’t have any specific quotes from this book, that is mostly related to the fact that the book didn’t have any specific small enough tidbits to take out that make sense out of context. This book is very interesting and discussed how the food corporations use salt, sugar, and fat as their three levers to pull to entice and inevitably hook people into eating junk food. If you are at all interested in the stories behind these behemoth companies, I would certainly recommend the book; just realize that it is a decently large book with a lot of information in it, so be warned about what you are undertaking. 
9. The Year of Living Biblically (3) – 3/22/19
10. The Age of Reason (3) – 3/23/19         
    • “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”        
    • “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”
11. Among the Mermaids (3) – 3/23/19
12. The Sleep Revolution (4) – 3/25/19      
    • “More than 40 percent of Americans get less than the recommended minimum seven hours of sleep per night”       
    • “An Australian study found that after being awake for seventeen to nineteen hours (a normal day for many of us!), we can experience levels of cognitive impairment equal to having a blood alcohol level of .05 percent (just under the legal limit in many US states). And if we’re awake just a few hours more, we’re up to the equivalent of 0.1 percent – legally drunk.”       
    • “drowsy drivers are involved in 328,000 accidents each year, 6,400 of which result in deaths.”
    • “Sleep was like food, a cherished and necessary – though not always available – source of physical and spiritual sustenance.”
    • “Never waste any time you could spend sleeping.”
    • “One of her most widely cited studies was published in 2011. [Cheri] Mah had eleven members of the Stanford basketball team wear sleep sensors for two weeks. She recorded their normal sleep patterns – they averaged just more than six and a half hours each night – along with statistics on sprints, free throws, and three-point shots. Then, for five to seven weeks, she had them aim for a minimum of ten hours in bed each night, spending as much of the time as possible asleep (‘sleep extension’ as it’s called). The players’ sleep average went up to eight and a half hours, and the increases in performance were dramatic. Sprint times were .7 seconds faster, free-throw shooting went up by 9 percent, and three-point shooting increased by 9.2 percent. That’s an amazing difference for such elite athletes – and all achieved just by sleeping more” 
    • “[Tom] Brady goes to bed at 8:30 p.m…”
    • “…Lebron James swears by twelve hours a day [of sleep] when practicing.”
    • “And tennis great Roger Federer trumps them all. ‘If I don’t sleep eleven to twelve hours a day, it’s not right’, he says.”
13. Guns, Germs, and Steel (4) – 3/27/19
    • I LOVE this book! It is an incredibly interesting book that traces humanity’s past through anthropological and historical realms by the glorious Jared Diamond.
14. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (3) – 3/28/19        
    • “Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass.”
15. Waking Up (3) – 3/30/19        
    • “Every moment of the day – indeed, every moment throughout one’s life – offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.”
16. The Art of Loving (2) – 4/2/19  
    • “…mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.”        
    • “…the person who believed in God – even if he did not live God – felt himself to be superior to the one who lived God, but did not ‘believe’ in him.”         
    • “Modern man thinks he loses something – time – when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains – except kill it.”
17. The Five Invitations (4) – 4/3/19       
    • “We will never know who we are and why we are here if we do not ask the uncomfortable questions.”       
    • “When people are dying, it is easy for them to recognize that every minute, every breath counts. But the truth is, death is always with us, integral to life itself. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is permanent. The idea can both frighten and inspire us. Yet if we listen closely, the message we hear is: Don’t wait.”       
    • “Be aware of the Great Matter of Birth and Death / Life passes swiftly, / Wake up, Wake up! / Do not waste this life.”
    • “‘Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.”
    • “All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. It is a remarkable form of self-acceptance that allows us to release unbelievable pain. It’s about realizing that as long as you hold on to the hot coal of your anger, resentment, and sense of having been wronged, you are only hurting yourself. Unless you release that burden, you will carry it with you for the rest of your life. You will never be free.”      
    • “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
    • “As the poet Galway Kinnell wrote, ‘Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.’”
    • “As people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: ‘Am I loved?’ and ‘Did I love well?’”
    • “My friend Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., says this better than anyone I know when she writes, ‘Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.’”       
    • “I side with the poet E.E. Cummings, who wrote, ‘It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.’”
    • “Bury me when I die / Beneath a wine barrel / In a tavern. / With luck / The cask will leak.” [Japanese death poem]
18. A Thousand Splendid Suns (4) – 4/4/19         
    • “And I also know that when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men, maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”           
    • “Sometimes Laila wondered why Mammy had even bothered having her. People, she believed now, shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones.”
19. Heretic (3) – 4/7/19       
    • “To me, however, when a murderer quotes the Qur’an in justification of his crime, we should at least discuss the possibility that he means what he says.”      
    • “For we cannot fight an ideology solely with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. We need to fight it with ideas – with better ideas, with positive ideas.”      
    • “Human life, human freedom, human dignity – they all matter more than any sacred text.”
    • “The dawn of a Muslim Reformation is the right moment to remind ourselves that the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion.”
20. Fantasyland (3) – 4/9/19        
    • “When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: ‘We forgot.’”     
    • “Religious zeal, said they, must necessarily fail, the more liberty is established and knowledge diffused.”        
    • “‘I know of no country where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,’ Tocqueville observed. ‘Love of money is either the chief or secondary motive in everything Americans do.’”        
    • “It was absurd that ‘the book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat,’ should refute science, and what Tennessee had done was ‘as plain religious ignorance and bigotry as any that justified…the hanging of the witches in New England.’” – about evolution being illegal to teach in schools      
    • “One set of fantasies has had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the most important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate. During my lifetime, the love of guns has become a fetish.”
    • “Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns. Members of that tiny minority of superenthusiasts own an average of seventeen guns apiece.”        
    • “The experts say that most mass killers are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics in the throes of clinical delusion; rather they’re citizens of Fantasyland, unhappy people with flaws and failures they blame on others, the system, the elitists, the world. They worry those resentments into sensational fantasies of paramilitary vengeance, and they know that acting out those fantasies will make a big splash and force the rest of us to pay attention to them for the first time.”        
    • “When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they envisioned a very small permanent national military. If Americans needed to fight wars, the states would assemble their militias. And so the Second Amendment: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’”
    • [In 2016] “‘Right now,’ LaPierre [head of NRA] told them, ‘we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us…some of the most radical political elements there are. Anarchists, Marxists, communists, and the whole rest of the left-wing socialist brigade.’”         
    • “‘In my opinion,’ Albert Einstein wrote, ‘the idea of a personal God is a childlike one…but I do not share the crusading point of the professional atheist…I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.’”
    • “You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts – especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.”
21. eaarth (3) – 4/10/19         
    • “In North America, center of the mechanized megafarm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that according to its latest census smaller farms produce far more food per acre, whether you measure that output in tons, calories, or dollars.”       
    • “So I’m willing to listen when Mary-Howell says, ‘Can organics feed the world? If the world changes its diet. We need more crops rotating, a more diverse diet, not all based on high fructose corn syrup.’”
    • “The biggest shifts will be political. There are ‘farms’ in the United States with hundreds of thousands of swine, producing more sewage each day than big cities. The animals are miserable, the pollution is intense, and it’s all utterly unsustainable – by some estimates, as much as half of global warming gases can be tied to the livestock industry, with its huge demands on our grain crops. But it makes a few big corporations rich, and it keeps the price of food incredibly low, and that bargain – enshrined in one federal farm bill after another – has prevailed for two generations. We’d need to challenge the power of those companies, and we’d need to be willing to pay our neighbors enough to grow our food so that they could lead decent lives.”            
    • “…at the moment [2010] Americans eat 200 pounds of grain directly, and 1800 pounds that’s been run through an animal first [to produce 187 pounds of meat]. By contrast, the average Chinese eats 850 pounds of grain with his chopsticks, and only 154 pounds indirectly, via cow or pig.”
    • “If the government simply stopped subsidizing commodity agriculture, that would likely be enough to tip the balance: 61 percent of the billions in farm subsidies that we pay each year go to the largest 10 percent of American farmers. Those sums skew the economics of farming against local producers – the ones who supply food, as opposed to corn syrup, and satisfying jobs, as opposed to hopeless hard labor.”
22. When Things Fall Apart (2) – 4/10/19           
    • “When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell.”     
    • “If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us…”
23. Just Mercy (5) – 4/12/19     

    • 

    • “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close”        
    • “One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.”         
    • “There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.”
    • “Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today [2014].”          
    • “State governments have been forced to shift funds from public services, education, health, and welfare to pay for incarceration, and they now face unprecedented economic crises as a result.”
    • “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
    • [Talking about an interracial couple caught in the 1880’s] “The Alabama Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1882. With rhetoric that would be quoted frequently over the next several decades, Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions…’The evil tendency of the crime [of adultery or fornication] is greater when committed between persons of the two races…Its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.’”        
    • “Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban in interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it.”
    • “I started writing my complaint determined not to reveal that I was an attorney. When I replayed the whole incident in my mind, what bothered me most was the moment when the officer drew his weapon and I thought about running. I was a twenty-eight year old lawyer who had worked on police misconduct cases. I had the judgement to speak calmly to the officer when he threatened to shoot me. When I thought about what I would have done when I was sixteen years old or nineteen or even twenty-four, I was scared to realize that I might have run. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about all the young black boys and men in the neighborhood. Did they know not to run? Did they know to stay calm and say, ‘It’s okay’?” 
    • “Many states had changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute children as adults, and my clients were getting younger and younger. Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state – or any other country in the world.”
    • “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”
    • “The study conducted for [McCleskey v. Kemp] revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. Those findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.”
    • “In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.”           
    • “By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of the youngest condemned children – thirteen or fourteen years of age – were black or Latino.”
    • [In reference to George Stinney – a wrongfully accused 14 year old black child said to have raped and killed two white girls in 1944] “…Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene and George was sent to Columbia to be executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Small even for his age, the five foot two, ninety-two-pound Stinney walked up to the chair with a Bible in his hand. He had to sit on the book when prison staff couldn’t fit the electrodes to his small frame. Alone in the room, with no family or any people of color present, the terrified child sat in the oversized electric chair. He frantically searched the room for someone to help but saw only law enforcement personnel and reporters. The adult-size mask slid off George’s face when the first jolt of electricity struck his body. Witnesses to the execution could see his ‘wide open, tearful eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.’ Eighty-one days after being approached by two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead.”              
    • Online EJI Report about cruel and unusual punishment.
    • “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”
    • “Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate of nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times.”
    • “In fact, it was in the 1950’s, after racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, that many Southern states erected Confederate flags atop their state government buildings. Confederate monuments, memorials, and imagery proliferated throughout the South during the Civil Rights Era.”
    • “…the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather ‘an orientation of the spirit.’ The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.”           
    • “‘Six years, six years gone.’ He looked away with a pained expression. ‘These six years feel like fifty. Six years, just gone. I’ve been so worried that they were going to kill me, I haven’t even thought about the time I’ve lost.’” – Walter McMillian who was wrongfully sent to death row for a crime he did not commit
    • “It all felt tragic. His struggle to form words and his determination to express gratitude reinforced his humanity for me, and it made thinking about his impending execution unbearable. Why couldn’t they see it, too? The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled. We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need – all so we can kill them with less resistance.”
    • “I do what I do because I’m broken, too.”
    • “But simply punishing the broken – walking away from them or hiding them from sight – only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
    • “Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
    • “I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”            
    • “Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us.”
24. Just Babies (3) – 4/16/19
25. The Personal MBA (4) – 4/17/19        
    • “There is scant evidence that the MBA credential, particularly from non-elite schools, or the grades in business courses – a measure of the mastery of the material – are related to either salary or the attainment of higher level positions in organizations.”        
    • “Motivation is an emotion – NOT a logical, rational activity.”
26. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (3) – 4/19/19        
    • “Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.”
27. Faith vs. Fact (4) – 4/20/19          
    • “One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human – except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death – without the superstitions of religion.”         
    • “Science and religion – unlike, say, business and religion – are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that had the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind).”           
    • “The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.” – Voltaire
    • “[S]cience and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe.”
    • “In the end, religious investigations of ‘truth,’ unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices.”         
    • “There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.”
    • “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
28. Undeniable (3) – 4/22/19        
    • “To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
29. The Coddling of the American Mind (5) – 4/24/19         
    • “Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it. According to Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in Harvard’s Department of Psychology: ‘Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.’”       
    • “For a student who truly suffers PTSD, appropriate treatment is necessary. But well-meaning friends and professors who work together to hide potential reminders of painful experiences, or who repeatedly warn the student about the possible reminders he or she might encounter, could be impeding the person’s recovery. A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourage people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”
    • “The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the ‘gadfly’ of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.”         
    • “When an individual goes so far as to describe someone as having blood on their hands for supporting the idea of bringing a highly controversial speaker to Williams [College], they are advancing the belief that what offends them should not be allowed on this campus precisely because it offends them and people who agree with them.”
    • “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
    • “[D]iscomfort is not danger.”
    • “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” – MLK
    • “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – MLK
    • “I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods…When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.” – Pauli Murray
    • “There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus – not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech – ‘you are an n-word,’ or whatever – I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendent, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the [university] administration.’” – Van Jones
    • “So many teens have lost the ability to tolerate distress and uncertainty, and a big reason for that is the way we parent them.” – Kevin Ashworth
    • “From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.” – John Roberts speech to middle schoolers
    • “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
    • Letgrow.org
    • “Encourage your children to engage in a lot of ‘productive disagreement.’”
    • [In disagreements:]
      • “Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.”
      • “Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind)”
      • “Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.”     
      • “Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.”
    • “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    • “Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: much more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people.” – Benjamin Franklin
30. The Death of Truth (3) – 4/27/19           
    • “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrication.”            
    • “‘Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.’ – Sally Yates”        
    • “Meanwhile, environmentalists were frantically trying to download and archive government climate data – worried that it might be destroyed or lost or hidden by a hostile administration. Some of their fears were realized later in 2017, when the EPA announced that its website was ‘undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction,’ including this Orwellian phrase: ‘updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.’”
31. Why Evolution is True (4) – 4/27/19          
    • “Today scientists have as much confidence in Darwinism as they do in the existence of atoms, or in microorganisms as the cause of infectious disease.”          
    • “We are apes descended from other apes, and our closest cousin is the chimpanzee, whose ancestors diverged from our own several million years ago in Africa. These are indisputable facts. And rather than diminishing our humanity, they should produce satisfaction and wonder, for they connect us to all organisms, the living and the dead.”
    • “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.” – Albert Einstein
32. The End of Food (3) – 4/29/19        
    • “Thus, despite the fact that food costs are half what they were fifty years ago and despite a global food supply that now exceeds per capita caloric needs by about 20 percent, the world has nearly as many malnourished citizens as it does overnourished ones, a perverse symmetry that is emblematic of the system’s larger failings.”          
    • “The flood of cheap food that had been so critical in helping societies regain physical and economic health emerged as a liability. Governments struggled to cope with the surpluses generated by their overly successful farm programs: in the United States and Europe, lawmakers had to pay farmers billions of dollars a year to grow less food.”   
    • “In the United States, as the physical demands of our work dropped, the amount of fuel available for each of us soared – from 3,100 calories in 1950 to nearly 4,000 calories by 2000. And while much of this excess wound up in landfills, the result of a food chain that had grown incredibly wasteful, our expanding girths suggested that at least some of these extra calories were reaching their targets.”   
    • “Even today, a country with less than 5 percent of the world’s population accounts for 40 percent of the world’s consumption of frozen food, ready meals, and soup.”
    • “[The US] in 2005, for example, before the ethanol boom turned grain markets upside down, the world price for corn had dropped to $1.85 a bushel. But because it actually cost American corn farmers nearly $3 to grow each of those bushels, taxpayers covered the difference, which, of course, only rewarded farmers for overproducing in the first place. Indeed, the main reason corn had fallen to $1.85 was that subsidized U.S. farmers were putting too much grain onto the world market.”               
    • “China’s small farms are more intensely managed than their Western counterparts: farmers often plant several crops a year, one after the other, and most keep livestock and even operate fish farms – a diversity that contrasts sharply with the single-crop monoculture model in the United States and which actually generates more calories per acre. Collectively, China’s two hundred million family farms produce 20 percent more output than do the United States’ two million farmers, and on a land base less than three-quarters as big as America’s.”
    • “In addition, the United States has tried for decades to reform its farm policy, if for no other reason than fiscal sanity: between 1995 and 2005 the U.S. Treasury doled out $155 billion for crop and livestock subsidies – more than America’s total foreign aid budget.”           
    • “One DNA analysis by researchers at Colorado State University found that the average four-ounce burger patty contains tissue from fifty-five separate cows; some patties had tissues from more than a thousand animals.”
    • “Studies by the USDA’s Animal Research Service, for example, found that even after multiple antimicrobial procedures, including chemical washes, steam washes, and some physical trimming of suspect meat, nearly 2 percent of cattle carcasses tested still had E. coli O157:H7…”
    • “And yet, nearly every credible forecast shows that if we’re to have any chance of meeting future food demand in a sustainable fashion, lowering our meat consumption will be absolutely essential.”
    • “The problem is that, for all the marvelous efficiency of the CAFO, these operations still can’t compensate for the inefficiency of the cows themselves; even in the best-run feedlot, the modern cow needs at least seven pounds of feed to put on a pound of live weight – nearly twice that of pigs, and more than triple that of chickens. Worse, because so much more of a cow’s weight is inedible – 60 percent is bone, organ, and hide – than is the case with smaller livestock, beef’s true conversion rate is actually far lower: it takes a full twenty pounds of grain to make a single pound of beef (compared to 4.5 and 7.3 for chicken and pigs, respectively). What this means is that every additional ton of beef consumed represents another twenty tons of feed to world demand – a rather impressive bit of caloric leverage that helps explain why 90 percent of the grain that Americans consume is eaten in the form of meat or dairy.”         
    • “The thirty-three thousand cubic feet of natural gas needed to make a ton of nitrogen fertilizer could be used instead to generate 9,671 kilowatts of electricity – enough to run the average U.S. home for ten and a half months.”
    • “On average, every ton of grain we grow requires a thousand tons of water, which is why agriculture now accounts for roughly three-quarters of all freshwater use.”