[This artist’s perspective is] to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man’s living, a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping for ever through our fingers with time’s sanded drop, flowing for ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can be held.

— Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

There is a corny saying in therapy circles, “If you spot it, you’ve got it,” which means that if you notice behavior in others, it’s probably because you behave in the same way.

— Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man

The payoffs that determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions, since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

We can’t give a perfect formula for deciding when it’s cheaper in the long term to import versus reimplement; we fail at this ourselves, more often than not.

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