The counter-culture of the 1960’s, like may other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

…some of our most common tools are more like anchors than propellers.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

Coupling, like the Lego piece in the night, often isn’t obvious until you step on it.

— Kent Beck, Tidy First?

If you can’t admit to yourself that you’ve done better than others—or if you’re ashamed of wanting to do better than others—then the median will forever be your concrete wall, the place where you stop moving forward.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

If men had always tried to deal with the problem of love in terms of known human rather than of grotesquely imagined divine interests, there would have been less “making of eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” less persecution of “sinners,” less burning and imprisoning of the heretics of “unnatural” love, less Grundyism, less Comstockery, and, at the same time, less dirty Don Juanism, less of that curiously malignant and vengeful love-making so characteristic of the debauchee under a Christian dispensation. Reacting against the absurdities of the old mythology, the young have run into absurdities no less inordinate at the other end of the scale.

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