Every civilized society has to carry below the sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty, crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great, central section of the masses, a great body which . . . lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. . . . It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed-ideas and prejudices. It is affected in its mores from the classes above it.

— William Graham Sumner, Folkways

Tell a bunch of average software developers to design a sailship. They will do a web search for available modules. They will pick a wind power module and an electric engine module, which will be attached to some kind of a floating module. When someone mentions aero- or hydrodynamics, the group will respond by saying that elementary physics is a far too specialized area, and it is cheaper and more straight-forward to just combine pre-existing modules and pray that the combination will work sufficiently well.

— viznut.fi, The Resource Leak Bug of Our Civilization

You could pass a homeless person without a second thought; but when you ask yourself, ‘What’s the right thing to do here?’, you may well think and behave differently. You might first wonder whether the person deserves charity, or at least whether they should be shown some. Just thinking about the situation changes your attitude. To study a moral quandary is to affect it.

— Myles King, Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Every rationalist doubts, but not all doubts are rational. Wearing doubts doesn’t make you a rationalist any more than wearing a white medical lab coat makes you a doctor.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols