…no mortal has the time or attention span to lay out every last premise and implication in an argument, so in practice almost all arguments are enthymemes.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

Google’s massive, internal study of what distinguishes high-performing teams from low-performing ones: Not team cohesion, motivation, or average IQ, but rather frequent turn-taking in conversations and high social sensitivity toward what team members are thinking and feeling.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

I don’t do the thing where you figure out your life’s purpose and then come up with 5-year plans to support that, your 2-year plans to support your 5-year plans, and so on. You know what’s important to you, and if something is a priority you’re already doing it.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line