The “goals” of natural selection transcend our bodies. So, strange as it might seem, selfish genes create altruistic animals, motivating kindness toward others

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

The committee perceives that Department of Defense acquisition has lost that permeating sense of urgency, replaced with ever-increasing layers of “oversight” mechanisms to avoid mistakes.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Designs of Design

“The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.”

— Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense

But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.

— Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play