Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"What I have witnessed and documented over the past decade is technology’s godlike power to infect each of us with a virus of lies, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hatred, and accelerating the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world."

"the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century."

"We are standing on the rubble of the world that was, and we must have the foresight and courage to imagine, and create, the world as it should be: more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable. A world that is safe from fascists and tyrants."

"We decided to use the power of group dynamics and social networks to do something positive: spread hope."

"I wanted to achieve an “empty mirror,” a concept I took from a book about a Buddhist monastery: to stand in front of a mirror and see the world without my image obstructing the view. I wanted to know myself to such a degree that I could take myself out of the equation when approaching the world around me and responding to it. That is clarity—the ability to remove your self and your ego."

"This is why propaganda networks are so effective in rewriting history: the distribution spread of a lie is so much greater than the fact-check that follows, and by the time the lie is debunked, those who believe it often refuse to change their views"

"Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences."

"What you choose to do shapes the person you become."

"The world we once knew is decimated. Now we have to decide what we want to create."

"Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity."

"there is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice."

"It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage."

"Please ask yourself the same question my team and I ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?"

"I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues."

"Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous it is to suffer even the tiniest cut. This is why I say to us all: we must hold the line."

"If you're lucky, you realize early on that each decision you make answers a question that all of us muddle through: how to build meaning in our lives. Meaning is not something you stumble across or what someone gives you; you build it through every choice you make, the commitments you choose, the people you love, and the values you hold dear."

"So we do our best with what we have: we act, and each day we iterate. (p. 257)"

"when President Trump called CNN and The New York Times fake news, a week later President Duterte called Rappler fake news. I think it is a bad time for the world when the former beacon of democracy, the fighter for press freedom and human rights, is noticeably absent. And I think you’re feeling that all around the world. Simultaneous to that, though, is the American technology companies that have allowed cheap armies on social media to roll back democracy, a new weapon used against journalists...Press freedom is not just for journalists. I think this is a critical time for democracy around the world, both in the Philippines and in the United States. And you must fight for your rights while you still can."

"My job is to hold power to account."

"Millions of Americans will receive money from Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, as part of a $141 million settlement between the Silicon Valley company and all 50 states and the District of Columbia."

"this billionaire businessman, Harlan Crow, flew Clarence Thomas to Indonesia a few years ago on his private jet. They were met there by his very large yacht, and they went on vacation together for about nine days. You know, this is a vacation - not a normal vacation. This could cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the striking thing about it is that Justice Thomas didn't report any of these gifts on his annual financial disclosure, where judges are supposed to report this sort of thing, which, you know, ethics lawyers told us that that could be a violation of the federal law."

"I think it's an interesting story of privatization of government services and how that's played out over time. The history here is 20 years ago during the George W. Bush administration, the IRS was actually considering offering its own official tax prep service. And the private tax prep industry didn't want that to happen. And we ended up with this sort of strange hybrid system that we're living in today."

"Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the dynasty and the empire itself became indisputably Indian. The interests and futures of all concerned were in India, not in ancestral homelands in the Middle East or Central Asia. Furthermore, the Mughal empire emerged from the Indian historical experience. It was the end product of a millennium of Muslim conquest, colonization, and state-building in the Indian subcontinent."

"I live in daily gratitude for everything I have now that would have been unfathomable for Chinese immigrants not so long ago. Our lives are built on the shoulders of giants. Honoring their legacy means living up to our privilege and continuing to push the movement forward. My vision for the beautiful country is this: to every new generation, more rights, more equality, more justice."

"I feel that the act of writing the book in itself without even submitting it for publication was transformative. It allowed me to heal because I was revisiting the past with my childhood self but also seeing it through an adult lens. And that’s essentially what you do in therapy – you re-parent yourself. What would you do if you were there with your childhood self? What would you tell that child? And in living through that process, I feel that I have healed a lot of those wounds that had stayed opened for decades. Those scars are always going to be there for sure and I will still have moments of irrational fear."

"I always wanted to share my story, even when I wasn’t talking about the past and didn’t tell anyone that I was undocumented. I always felt that I had this story burning inside me and it was frustrating to have it pent up in there. It was growing inside me and gnawing at my consciousness, so I think it needed to take this long for this book to come out and if I waited longer, it probably would have come out in a different form."

"The growth of Asian American pride is heartening. The young generations of immigrants, Asian Americans, undocumented Americans, and Americans of color never cease to give me faith for the future. That said, new changes in the right direction do not necessarily erase previous wrongs and old hurts. Once someone has felt the acute pain of being dehumanized, that experience stays with them. It does not disappear overnight, nor do the barriers that are built into the foundation of our society. To achieve real, lasting progress, we must remember that."

"So, what I endeavored to do with my book was to speak heart-to-heart, and the childhood lens allowed me the perfect avenue to do so. My vision for my book was that it might allow readers to feel as if they were getting aboard a train, which would carry them through the terrain of my childhood—through that journey, they would be able to see new sights, yes, but also revisit some of their own experiences and familiar landscape. Through this, I hope, people might start to see that underneath the labels and political divides, none of us are all that different from each other, and that at bottom, we all want much of the same things: safety, community, and meaning."

"In books, both fiction and nonfiction, what matters is not what happens in the book but how is it is told. By virtue of living, we experience facets of the human experience. How we experience those facets and what we take away from them are both fascinating because they are uniquely ours (because there is no other person exactly like each of us on the planet, and no one who will respond exactly the same way) and because it is universally human. Thus, it does not so much matter what you write about, but how you choose to write and what messages you share. To aspiring writers: I hope you will remember that there is magic and beauty in your experiences and perspectives simply because they are yours."

"The act of processing the memories I had suppressed for decades had freed me to see not just younger me, but the younger versions of my mother and father in their full dimensions. That in turn allowed me to honour everything we had been and had experienced—both the good and the bad."

"In our undocumented existence, it was unsafe for me to be fully honest about myself and my reality with any other real person. Fictional characters thus formed my safe circle — the place in which I was safe to be my full self. Overnight, I also saw all my loved ones and family disappear, and I didn’t know whether I would ever see them again. The characters of these books filled that void of loneliness, and in their presence I learned that it was natural to be scared sometimes, or lonely. They also taught me the power of storytelling, and of words."

"When I taught myself English on library books in the 90s, it was very difficult to find books that reflected me and my reality. That lack of representation left me feeling even more lonely and shameful. When I expressed that to my mother, she never failed to tell me that I would one day have the power to change that. So, thanks to my mother’s wisdom that vision and dream was always with me. I’m just grateful that it is now a reality."

"For a child who found herself transported overnight to other side of the world, where she knew no one other than her parents, books were my salvation."

"For me, Qian represents the self and the precocious, mischievous child who went from knowing only love and acceptance to living in daily shame and hunger. And Julie represents the pre-teen, teen, and woman who was determined to survive no matter the cost, even if it meant hiding or obliterating her origin story and her authentic self. Both of these names are integral parts of me, and I can no more choose between them than I can between my left and right legs."

"I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever—there's a lot more to it than we imagine."

"What does it mean? Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be, for lack of a better word, a "God-detector", you know? What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?"

"It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes, and for a few minutes, you're immersed in sort of this raw data sphere of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations. I mean, it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things: what you're experiencing, what you have experienced, and how you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially, about what's going on, where you are in space and time."

"Terence was very … he was a good promoter. Basically, he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill. Even though it's not a pill, but I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it. It would seem to be of a different order than LSD and mescaline and some of the other things that were around. DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience."

"One of the things besides what it does, one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me, was the fact that it's such a simple molecule. Biosynthetically, it's two steps from tryptophan, right? Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan. Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and it's everywhere. So all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT. And these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, they're all over the place. They are, again, part of basic metabolism. So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT."

"Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming."

"Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the "elegance" of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it "makes sense". It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)"

"Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they're suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That's no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life."

"We grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father who was a Nazi sympathizer. Like father like daughter?! This was the familial soil that gave bloom to my sister's anger."

"As scholars such as Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have shown, threat narratives of replacement, conquest, invasion, and infestation have circulated for well over a century. What is new is how this racist rhetoric is being promulgated by a particularly influential set of forces that includes a white nationalist president, formidable conservative media ecosystem, and an empowered anti-immigrant and alt-right political contingent, often undergirded by a persistent gun culture." Together, this nativist assemblage has taken up the white nationalist rhetoric of the "great replacement"-a conspiracy theory in which white people are being systematically "replaced" by people of color through mass migration (possibly orchestrated by Jews and other "globalists"). Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in particular characterize white Americans as being "replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats." Ingraham tells Fox viewers that "the Democrats want to replace many of you. with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain immigrants"...Pushing a conspiracy theory that Democrats are encouraging noncitizens to vote to win elections, Trump, Fox, and other antiimmigrant forces have created a xenophobic resonance machine that continually characterizes Mexicans and other Latinx populations as an invasive force. Speaking to Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, Ingraham characterized Texas as "completely overrun by this illegal invasion" and said that "calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people.""

"How is allowing 600K students from the Communist country of China putting America first?"

"About Justin Trudeau:"

"We are officially working for an organization that hates us."

"Wolf Blitzer, as I understand it, his parents weren’t vi his family comes out of that background — but you wouldn’t know it. Because the ideology o if you’re in media."

"It’s really an important part of our democracy to have an excellent world-class news organization — like CNN is, like other news organizations are. It’s very concerning, very worrisome that the president of the United States, you know, goes after us the way that he does."

"Yeah, but she's cramming a lot of information..."