…you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

The quickest way to get from a high floor to the street is to jump out a window, but our “faith” in the laws of gravity and the fragility of our bodies make this an irrational act for anyone who cares to stay alive. On the other hand, an atheist gets along quite well, thank you, without believing in God. It only obscures the nature of faith to liken it to the inescapable necessity of believing in causal laws.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

I encounter people who very definitely believe in evolution, who sneer at the folly of creationists. And yet they have no idea of what the theory of evolutionary biology permits and prohibits.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

The romantic Green movement sees the human capture of energy not as a way of resisting entropy and enhancing human flourishing but as a heinous crime against nature, which will exact a dreadful justice in the form of resource wars, poisoned air and water, and civilization-ending climate change. Our only salvation is to repent, repudiate technology and economic growth, and revert to a simpler and more natural way of life.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now