A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

— Martin Meadows, 365 Days With Self-Discipline

…it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.” As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are “his own thoughts” and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naïvety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Thus in social media-driven politics, we find ourselves at the surfaces of things, feeding on apparent victories, enraged by apparent setbacks, ignorant of the real-world impact of what we are perceiving. But even when it is working as it should, politics is a competition more than it is a shared endeavor.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought