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Back in the hospital room, Midori aimed a stream of talk at her father again, and he would either grunt in response or say nothing.

— Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Mercier and Sperber are adamant that our reasoning isn’t flawed or irrational, just biased and lazy, which is both adaptive and rational in the context in which it evolved, a language-based information ecosystem where the selective pressures favored the production of justifications for individual perspectives during group deliberation to reach consensus on inferences and shared goals. “In other words,” as Stafford explains, “Their big idea, briefly, is that human reason evolved to convince others (and be skeptical of other’s attempts to convince you).”

— How Minds Change by David McRaney

If a promising change to belief, behavior, or attitude was too much of an outlier, epistemic vigilance might incorrectly tag it as suspicious. Should too many people tag it that way, good information that could benefit the group would fail to spread.

— How Minds Change by David McRaney

all knowledge, “no matter how novel, is never at first, totally independent of previous knowledge. It is only a reorganization, adjustment, correction, or addition with respect to existing knowledge. Even experimental data unknown up to a certain time must be integrated with existing knowledge. But this does not happen by itself; it takes an effort of assimilation and accommodation.”

— How Minds Change by David McRaney

Since the brain doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, when it constructs causal narratives it fills holes in reality with provisional explanations. The problem is that when a group of brains all uses the same placeholder, good-enough-for-now construal to plug such a hole, over time that shared provisional explanation can turn into consensus—a common sense of what is and is not true. This tendency has led to a lot of strange shared beliefs over the centuries, consensus realities that today seem preposterous.

— How Minds Change by David McRaney

Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

— Prisoners of geography by Tim Marshall

"If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their work place? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue – control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is – a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labour, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.’"

— Complete Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

To designate feelings, to verbalize them, was to, necessarily, alter them, with no particular direction or mission. When I was very young, I didn’t trust speech, believing that other, nonword languages would intrude, complicate, or obstruct meaning, body language, facial expressions, timing, inflection, and so I wrote notes, letters. Now I knew that any movement from initial, pure thought was a movement away from precise meaning or representation.

— Dr. No by Percival Everett (Page 63)