I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

As Fred Brooks argues, conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design, and if a system is to have it, one person must control the concepts…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.’

— E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

…isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow