Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
If you're just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you're going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.
That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.
Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that's how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space.
Are you the sum total of your worst acts?
Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.
When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.
I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.
A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him.
One must try, everyday, to expand one's limits.
I am trying so hard to live in the moment and enjoy it while it's happening, because it feels like a moving freight train that I just got on, and I'm trying not to look back and get dizzy!