After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws thin… - Kim Stanley Robinson

We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.

Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.”

One morning he spent three hours talking about feudalism—how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model.