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Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation - even shame.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

[Teotihuacan] didn't come out of nowhere. While there might be a recognizable 'package' of Mesoamerican kingship, there also appears to have been a very different, dare we say repub-lican, tradition as well.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

We realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation - a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It's striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

Others note scattered evidence for the city's extension over a far greater area, maybe three times this size - we'd have to call them 'Lower, Lower Towns' - long since submerged by floodplain soils: a poignant illustration of that conspiracy between nature and culture which so often makes us forget that shanty dwellers even exist.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but ultimately hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Genghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

It's hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.! The trouble is just that 'we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.'

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we'd say 'all men are brothers' when trying to express internationalism (even if we can't stand our actual brother and haven't spoken to him for years). What's more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we've seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety sys-tems across Australia.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

When you listen to the life stories of rank-and-file american stalinists what stands out is how often they had their initial political development alone, amid a sea of liberals/conservatives, without even a single other leftist in sight.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

Even as a young teenager, I couldn't help but feel perturbed by the implicit tension dividing up the masses in the streets. Were we advocating an alternative globalization from below or were we micro-nationalists opposed to movement, connection, and consensus?

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association - a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden vol-umes. Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter re-moteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft