Rebuilding Quotes

“A good psychologist will take already-traumatic events in your life and work with you to contextualize them as non-traumatic. A bad psychologist will take non-traumatic events in your life and twist your narrative to both make them traumatic and connect them to your current problems. The problem is that good psychologists solve your issues while bad ones create dependency and thus recurring revenue streams.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“The first time the extent of this problem was obvious to me was when I was hanging out with a small group of people in which one unironically said, “I would not consider dating someone who was not regularly seeing a psychologist”—and others in the group agreed with them. It was at that point I realized that some psychologists were convincing their patients that no person could be mentally healthy without regularly visiting them. They had so thoroughly incepted a dependency in their patients that they had created a cultural identity around that dependency.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“The real heroes are those who rebuild their lives using adversity as a stepping stone to greatness in the midst of the chaos life has thrown at them.”
― Nikki Rowe

“Destruction is essential to construction. If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn. [...]

The building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / A Toolkit for Modern Life

“A marker of healing from religious trauma is not simply the process of deconstructing one’s worldview and identity and rebuilding a new one; it is also the willingness to remain open to shifting and changing over the course of one’s life.”
― Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion

“We discussed what we want from you now,...you who had power and used it to burn the world. You burned a lot. You didn't just burn trees and cities and each other. You burned our admiration for the governments we grew up respecting. You burned our sense of safety in your care. You burned our patience, our ability to believe that the great things in this world you promised to protect will still be there for us and future generations. You burned our trust as you misused the data and surveillance we let you collect, first for O.S. and the Canner Device, then for the war, its propaganda and its lies. You burned our self-trust, too, since we know we are infused with your values, values we thought made both you and us people who would never do what you just did. We have to be afraid of ourselves now, vigilant against what you've taught us to be, since now we know we are something to be afraid and ashamed of. And even if you didn't personally kill in the war, if you carried arms, if you participated, you helped burn what nothing can bring back. No sentence can repair any of that. So, we want you to repair what you can. That's our sentence. We want you to rebuild the cities, replant the trees, replace the art, relaunch the satellites, fix the bridges you can fix to make up for the ones you can't. We want you to rebuild the system, too, fixing the holes this has exposed and making more safeguards so no one can misuse the cars and data and surveillance and trackers and such again. We want you to build it all back but better than it was, and faster than any past war has rebuilt. You weren't as good at peace as you thought you were, but maybe you can be as good at rebuilding. Everyone, even Minors like Tribune MASON who took part, if in your heart you know you were complicit, then build back what you burned with your own hours, your own efforts, your own hands. That's our sentence.”
― Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars

“Rebuilding a worldview and identity likely needs to include space for uncertainty.”
― Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion

“Just like a tree that loses branches and dead leaves in the Autumn, I will rebuild anew. I will rebuild new branches and leaves. I will rebuild and maintain only what bears me fruits.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Part of coming together as a nation means accepting what has been done, rebuilding, helping those harmed, and finding power in forgiveness and redemption.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice

“Sometimes healing looks like falling apart. Sometimes falling apart is the path to what can be built.

Sometimes, we go through the darkest nights, and there is nobody but the man in the moon to hear. He always listens.

Now you listen.
There is not enough air in the room, but you are breathing. There is nobody here, but you are held. You have broken, and the world is breaking, and we will always rebuild.

Do you hear me, love?
We will always rebuild.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“Instead of assembling the shattered pieces of my outer existence and inner reality into an incomprehensible structure, I learned to consciously create a new life.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“It takes a wild sort of courage to break your own heart in order to stay true to yourself.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“The question is not whether the paranoid Germany is incurable but whether we are. All Germany did was start a war; we and our Allies have to finish one and then construct a world out of broken promises and old bottle caps.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Whatever name you want to pin on Germany's trouble, it is contagious, it is human, and there is a lot of it around. Doctor Brickner has managed to give the impression that the problem of the peace is a problem of turning Germans into nice people. This is misleading and gives many persons the same sort of holier-than-thou feeling which Nazism celebrates. The question today is not whether German is incurably paranoid but whether her enemies are incurably nationalistic. The answer to this question is yet to be made and we advise our readers to keep their eye on the ball.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Lord Cranborne pointed out last week that when the Allies meet to reconstruct the Atlantic Charter, the fixing would be done by the powers. Small nations, he said, would not be included in the talks because to include them would be to 'cause confusion.' Seems very probable it would. Complications are bound to arise when you consult all the interested parties in any affair. Nevertheless, we strongly recommend this sort of confusion.”
― E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Now that I have died by one's hand I must learn to live by my own”
― Christina Casino

“Rebuilding of hurricane Ian damaged homes will likely be muted, as 80% of owners did not have insurance.”
― Steven Magee

“A lot of people are going to get rich from rebuilding Florida after the hurricane Ian disaster.”
― Steven Magee

“It’s unfortunate that I’m just now living. Don’t be like me. Live and soak up every single moment. Lean into them, even the moments that terrify you. That’s how you know you’re alive.”
― A.E. Valdez, Colliding With Fate

“The human brain evolved to work within a strict cultural framework. Our brains and cultural/religious mechanisms co-evolved to work together. Operating our brains in a cultural/religious vacuum is like trying to run a machine without any grease—it will start fritzing and fall to pieces at a much faster rate. When individuals cast off their ancestral cultural/religious frameworks or make up new ones out of whole cloth without carefully investigating the instrumental roles cultural practices play, is it any surprise that they find themselves barely holding it together mentally by their mid-30s while desperately searching for community and purpose? Instead of taking the winding road to their destination, they decided to just beeline their car (brain) straight through muddy fields and, in the process, damage their car.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Throughout history, as humans developed social environments we had not biologically evolved to handle (such as early cities). Through the selective pressures on cultures, we evolved social technologies that permitted relatively rapid adaptation. Unfortunately, from the internet to megacities, the rate of change humans encounter today has become so rapid and momentous that even social evolution may not have time to act before permanent damage is inflicted. We may have reached a point in human history at which we must intentionally engineer cultural solutions to ensure a prosperous future for our species.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“Upon hearing about an Indian caste system comprised of five main castes, each of which is divided into about 3,000 sub-castes based on occupation, most foreigners contextualize the concept as being quite alien. People of Anglo-Saxon descent may come to this conclusion forgetting that many of their brethren still walk around with names like Smith and Tailor attached to them—names that hail from a similar caste system. That’s right: In the medieval period, families often maintained specialist trades passed down from one generation to the next. While the Anglo-Saxon caste system was never as strict as that which ultimately developed in India, it wasn’t profoundly less strict than its pre-British Indian counterpart. . . .  What is fascinating about caste systems, and likely a core reason they evolved in so many cultures, is that they allow for the genetic concentration of skills within certain specialties. As offensive as this concept is, the genetic vortices created by castes are so strong that their effects can be seen centuries after they dissolved. A study  conducted in the U.K. in 2015 found that people with the surname Smith (descended from the smith caste) had higher physical capabilities and an above-average aptitude for strength-related activities, while those with the surname Tailor (descended from the tailor caste) had a higher-than-average aptitude for dexterity-related tasks.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models

“I could waste my time counting all the hurts that you have caused me. But I choose to rebuild myself by counting all the strong points that I still have in me.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Failure is relative. Some things are meant to crumble and fall simply to be rebuilt in order to foster positive change and a broadened mindset. I call that success.”
― Terry a O'Neal

“do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. capture tomorrows”
― Haki R. Madhubuti

“I must start to build again after this long period of anguish and despair. Keep silent—and have confidence in myself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951