“You don’t have to have scriptural or religious teaching. It’s just the truth: You can’t survive on your own. If you say you are going to be totally selfish, in next to no time the person who is totally selfish goes under. You need other people in order to be human. That’s why when they want to punish you they put you in solitary confinement. Because you can’t flourish without other human beings. They give you things that you cannot give yourself, no matter how much money you have. And so we speak of Ubuntu. A person is a person through other persons. And there must have been some people who said, ‘Ah, what a primitive way of thinking.’ It’s the most fundamental law of our being. We flout that—we flout it at our peril.”
— The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, et al. a.co/ev9u1va