Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla calls tyrannophilia.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Legacy modernization projects go better when the individuals contributing to them feel comfortable being autonomous and when they can adapt to challenges and surprises as they present themselves because they understand what the priorities are. The more decisions need to go up to a senior group—be that VPs, enterprise architects, or a CEO—the more delays and bottlenecks appear.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

…you would do well to be less vocally skeptical while still letting your team know you’re aware of the intricacies and obstacles involved in your work.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google