Software engineering has this in common with having children: the labor before the birth is painful and difficult, but the labor after the birth is where you actually spend most of your effort.

— Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, Site Reliability Engineering

Still, hunter-gatherer religions have at least two features that are found, in one sense or another, in all the world’s great religions: they try to explain why bad things happen, and they thus offer a way to make things better.

— Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

The intelligentsia therefore feels entitled to deal with the poor as a construct; one they created. Thus they become convinced that they know what is best for them.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

…none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.

— Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking