I have a few daily reads books—the kind that has a different entry for each day of the year with quotes, insights, thoughts, wisdom, etc.—that I’m reading through this year. Yesterday’s entries felt especially relevant to the current moment we find ourselves in.

from 365 Days of Meditations from Diogenes the Cynic and Aristippus the Cyrenaic by Frances Roseuvir 📚

When [Diogenes] saw a notice on the house of a profligate man, “To be sold.” “I knew,” said he, “that you who are so incessantly drunk, would soon vomit up your owner.”

from A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 📚

From the first moment the members of a religious gathering said, “The Holy Spirit is among us,” when they claimed theirs the highest authority above all other authorities, when they accepted the results of their own meditation as more worthy than the divine spark that exists in every person (that is, the intellect and the conscience), from this time, a great lie originated, a lie which deceives the bodies and souls of many people, which has destroyed millions of human beings, and which continues its terrible work.

-Randall Thomas Davidson

from The Daily Laws by Robert Greene 📚

The tribe feels its very existence at stake by the presence of the enemy. There is little middle ground. Battles can be more intense and violent between tribes. The future of the human race will likely depend on our ability to transcend this tribalism and to see our fate as interconnected with everyone else’s. We are one species, all descendants of the same original humans, all brothers and sisters. Our differences are mostly an illusion. Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups. We must see ourselves as one large reality group and experience a deep sense of belonging to it.

We must come to the conclusion that the primary group we belong to is that of the human race. That is our inevitable future. Anything else is regressive and far too dangerous.

We are all different, we are all human.