Stupidity always follows on the heels of smugness.

— Roman Gelperin, On Rotting Prison Straw

The battle to combat entropy by continually having to supply more energy for growth, innovation, maintenance, and repair, which becomes increasingly more challenging as the system ages, underlies any serious discussion of aging, mortality, resilience, and sustainability, whether for organisms, companies, or societies.

— Geoffrey West, Scale

…the higher up the chain of command you are, the more reason people have to hide things from you…

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…your team members are also like plants: some need more light, and some need more water (and some need more…fertilizer).

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator), The Idiot