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This tendency to assume that the golden age was in the past, and that change was very likely to be threatening and harmful, is particularly strongly associated with socjeties that depended on farming as their main energy source. Without a scientific understanding of weather, crop fertility and disease, the annual variation in crop outputs tended to be understood as being controlled by a god or gods. As with athletes wearing the same pair of lucky socks in which they set their personal best, farming societies tended to repeat formulas that had worked in previous years: we made sacrifices in the temple and had a good year, so if we interfere with either the sacrifices or the temple, how are we to know that our fortunes will not change for the worse?

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder (Page 53)

As with the architectural styles of Uruk and Egypt, however close we get to the origins of classicism it seems to be born out of copying earlier buildings.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder (Page 51)

In another timeless pattern, the sculptor who oversaw the entire design was a personal friend of the powerful politician who pushed through the commissioning of the Parthenon.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder (Page 48)

It is now clear that the division between countryside and town was absent in the Mayan rainforest.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder

Long before coins, workers in Uruk were paid in energy itself: standard-sized bowlfuls of grain.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder (Page 18)

Even relatively unsophisticated slash-and-burn farming could support ten or twenty times more people on the same area of land. Yet for many or most of the new individuals who owed their existence to cereals, the farming life was tougher than their ancestors’ hunter-gatherer way of life: more hard physical work, much of it grindingly repetitive, a worse diet, increased levels of disease and earlier death.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder

Let me call it cosmic solidarity: solar politics, which breaks the promethean vicious circle of worship and extractivism, begins from the recognition that the sun is neither a master, nor a slave. The sun is a comrade.

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 119)

In any case, how could we avoid the traps of anthropomorphism, if it is true that we are living from now on in the era of the Anthropocene!

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 86)

Addressing nature in terms of emancipatory poli-tics is replete with translating solar violence into the language of means and ends, that is, of the restricted economy

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 84)

According to Isabelle Stengers, modern eco-logical crisis can be understood as the intrusion of Gaia: “Gaia is ticklish and that is why she must be named as a being. We are no longer deal-ing (only) with a wild and threatening nature, nor with a fragile nature to be protected, nor a nature to be mercilessly exploited. The case is new.”

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 86)

We are, however, used to thinking of energy as a limited resource for all productive activities. For Bataille, this was not the case. He saw the problem not in the lack but in the excess of energy, the ultimate source of which is the sun.

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 61)