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"How the myth that foragers live in a state of infantile simplicity is kept alive? (...) The real answer, we suggest, has more to do with the legacy of European colonial expansion; and in particular its impact to both indigenous and European systems of thought, especially with regard to the expression of rights of property in land. (...) Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature - which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working." (Pages 148-149)

"[Boehm] argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth — ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination) — none of which have any parallel among other primates."

"By far the most common reasons [staying with adoptive native tribes], however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is." (page 20.)

"Authoritarianism today takes different forms than it did in the past, adapting its tactics against those of democracy. For democracy to thrive, its institutions must be vulnerable to continual reinvention. Its traditions must be alive enough to permit that. The task of making online spaces governable, therefore, should begin with imaginations radical enough to transcend existing institutions, together with the playfulness to hone imagination in practice."

"I hadn’t really existed as a real person until prison. The illusionary values of my Southern, religious, conservative, materialist culture — and materialism in particular — suddenly faded, like palimpsest, a ghost of a self." -- Eric Borsuk, from Bidders of the Din.

"It’s strange that his ghost won't abandon me. It is the type of strange that compels me to take each bottle from my trash and consider the volume of my stomach. I want to consider what I poured into myself and how my father made a life of not remembering. I know the limit of what I can contain in each day. Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more."

"... refuse to regard technology as the angel of history, the divine agent, and instead insist that we are still just talking about how people relate to one another. Against feudal technology and the authoritarian revival it helped produce, the retort is not another technology, but the practice of political skills."

"Franklin Roosevelt was right: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men,” and a country besieged by poverty is not a free country.

Compared to a freedom that is contingent on our bank accounts—rich people’s freedom—a freedom that comes from shared responsibility, shared purpose and gain, and shared abundance and commitment strikes me as a different sort of human liberation altogether: deeper, warmer, more lush.

This kind of freedom “makes you happy—and it makes you accountable,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer has put it. ‘All flourishing is mutual'. Why? Because poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere."

"Poverty abolitionists do the difficult thing. They donate to worthy organizations, yes, but they must do more. If charity were enough, well, it would be enough, and this book would be irrelevant. Giving money away is a beautiful act, and yet poverty persists. Rather than throwing money over the wall, let’s tear the wall down."

"We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them." ... "Increasingly, American consumers are considering the environmental impact of their purchases. We should consider their poverty impact, too."