This sort of thing sometimes causes people undue distress, as in the recent MIT Technology Review cover, featuring moonwalker Buzz Aldrin with the headline “YOU PROMISED ME MARS COLONIES. INSTEAD I GOT FACEBOOK.” But, in fairness, a Mars colony would cost a few trillion dollars, while Facebook is free. And, it’s worth noting that the choice of Facebook is a bit crafty. Imagine if they’d picked Wikipedia: “YOU PROMISED ME MARS COLONIES, AND ALL I GOT WAS ALL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE INDEXED AND AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE ON EARTH FOR FREE.

— Kelly Weinersmith, Soonish

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

My emphasis on language also comes from a deep conviction that language shapes our thoughts. You cannot answer a question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for.

— Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why

Psychologically, we have come to rely so heavily on the elaborate and complicated products of cultural evolution for our survival that we now often put greater faith in what we learn from our communities than in our own personal experiences or innate intuitions.

— Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success

Morgenstern found Princeton to be much as Einstein had described it five years earlier; ‘a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts’.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future