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Sinds de Franse Revolutie hebben tien generaties vrouwen en mannen elkaar opgevolgd aan het firmament van de geschiedenis, een onmetelijk groot, geducht en veelbelovend firmament. Twee eeuwen lang konden mannen en vrouwen opkijken naar die vage lijn en konden zij hun eigen kleine individuele bestaan voelen als een deel van een breder verhaal, van een tumultueuze, bij vlagen krankzinnige, vaak bloedige vertelling, die hun betekenis en richting kon geven. Bij nacht schitterde de Geschiedenis als een poolster eeuwig aan de hemel boven onze zorgen.

— Fascisme en populisme by Antonio Scurati (Page 12)

The community itself is less accommodating; we get a chilly reception from year-round residents and business owners, who blame the Survey for causing the local economy to collapse. During the day, while doing errands in town, I avoid driving the USGS truck with the agency logo emblazoned on its doors, preferring to carry groceries on my back rather than risk confrontations in the parking lot with people who begrudge geologists. It feels unfair to be made pariahs simply for listening to Earth and translating what we are learning - though this is only the first of many times I will encounter people who resent geologists for talking about things they would rather ignore,like climate change, or groundwater contamination,or evolution.

— Turning to Stone by Marcia Bjornerud (25%)

In my own student days, I often felt a dissonance between the flat affect with which our professors delivered their lectures and the profound implications of what they were saying. This planet, I realized, is truly strange. We Earthlings take for granted the great variety of rock types that create the geologic infrastructure in which we live. But this is only because Earth is such a versatile and virtuosic cook, a planet that has learned to mix, distill, and recombine available ingredients in ways that no others have. Basalt, however, is one of the most basic recipes, whipped up in two easy steps in hell's kitchen: just heat up some mantle rock, then take the lid off. Even amateurs like the moon, Mars and Venus have mastered that.

— Turning to Stone by Marcia Bjornerud (22%)

Listen to the white world appallingly weary from its immense effort the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars listen to the proclaimed victories which trumpet their defeats listen to their grandiose alibis (stumbling so lamely)

— Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire (Page 47)

I refuse to pass my swellings off for authentic glories. And I laugh at my old childish imaginings. No, we have never been amazons at the court of the King of Dahomey, nor the princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor doctors Timbuctoo when Askia the Great was king, nor architects at Djenné, nor Madhis, nor warriors. We do not feel in our armpits the itch of those who once carried the lance. And because I have sworn to conceal nothing of our history (I who admire nothing so much as sheep grazing on an afternoon in its own shadow), I wish to confess that we were always quite undistinguished dishwashers, small-time shoeshiners, at the very most fairly conscientious witch-doctors, and the only record we hold is our staying power under the whip. For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heartbeat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking manure hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in our shit and were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God was in its acts.

— Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire (Page 36)

Scientists studying impact craters on the moon found that there had been a steep rise in the number of asteroid strikes in the last 290 million years. Astonishingly, we are now three times more likely to suffer an impact than the dinosaurs; they were just very unlucky.

— Novacene by James Lovelock (Page 58)