Collectively we are genocidal, and individually we are all potential concentration camp guards. We are both the lust for life and the craving for death: they are what make us human.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

In 1976, Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The idea that everyone should own all the code, I don’t think is really practical because there’s going to be too much of it. People are going to have to specialize; you need an expert sometimes.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things—in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses—a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols.

— Aldous Huxley, Huxley trusts and heirs, The Genius and the Goddess

Dostoevsky, the only psychologist from whom I’ve anything to learn… he ranks amongst the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols