”You kind of get used to it,’” he repeated. “Fifty per cent of the Consolations of Philosophy in seven words. And the other fifty per cent can be expressed in six: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re dead. Or if you prefer, you can make it seven: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re not dead.”

— Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

A work of art is never what we want it to be – it is independent of the meaning we project upon it

— Sam McAuliffe, The Urgency of Art

strategic systems come through a long-term adaptive process, rather than through a major breakthrough that brings quick rewards … we cannot set out to develop an SIS.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…in the textbooks from which each new scientific generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions