…the amount of workplace aggression and stress I see in people is inversely correlated with the importance of the work they’re doing…

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason… and… and… do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

I’m not saying black boxes are useless. I’m saying that if I’m not allowed to open ‘em up—if I have to do everything with a library or something like this, I would come up with much, much worse results and much slower.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…much of what passes for cognition is actually a substitute for it, a second-hand trick made necessary by the exigencies of living in a flux-and-process reality without being willing to acknowledge this fact.

— Abraham Maslow, Cognition of the Particular and the Generic

…self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain