The world says: “You have needs – satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Brand notes, “No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was—maybe more so. . . . Working with that robustness is how conservation’s goals get reached.”

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

…many consider the handling of whitespace (the spaces between words) in the Ruby language to be a replay of a mistake in the original C language that was fixed long ago. (Note that one of the classic ways to deal with a mistake is to call it a feature.)

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs