Contrary to some people’s instincts, leaders who admit mistakes are more respected, not less.

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

…consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago