I don’t know anyone who can predict how multiple technologies will behave in every potential scale condition, especially not when they are combined.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

The uncomfortable truth is that every generation of technologists thinks the next generation is doing it wrong.

— Krzyś, The Junior Developer Extinction: We’re All Building the Next Programming Dark Age

Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

[A State is] a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

— Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote