When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet’s ecosystem. It was not the last. Yung Lean Read Quote
The basic human reaction to pleasure is not satisfaction, but rather craving for more. Hence, no matter what we achieve, it only increases our craving, not our satisfaction. Yung Lean Read Quote
You need to constantly remind yourself what is the most important thing that is happening in the world – what is the most important thing that is happening in history. The discipline to have this focus is something I gained from meditation. Yung Lean Read Quote
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. Yung Lean Read Quote
If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete – there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me. Yung Lean Read Quote
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. Yung Lean Read Quote
The old 20th-century political model of Left vs. Right is now basically irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. All over the world, this is not the main struggle. Yung Lean Read Quote
Everybody since the ’60s has been saying the nation is a fiction – the nation is an imaginary unity – but people didn’t connect the dots and say all human endeavours sprang from the same principle. Yung Lean Read Quote
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. Yung Lean Read Quote
Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix. Yung Lean Read Quote
