nothing straight can be fashioned out of the crooked timber of humanity

— Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Effective training in critical thinking and cognitive debiasing may not be enough to cure identity-protective cognition, in which people cling to whatever opinion enhances the glory of their tribe and their status within it. This is the disease with the greatest morbidity in the political realm, and so far scientists have misdiagnosed it, pointing to irrationality and scientific illiteracy instead of the myopic rationality of the Tragedy of the Belief Commons.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…human brain is but a finite machine, therefore there are only finitely many propositions which you believe. Let us label these propositions p1, p2, …, pn, where n is the number of propositions you believe. So you believe each of these propositions p1, p2, …, pn. Yet, unless you are conceited, you know that you sometimes make mistakes, hence not everything you believe is true. Therefore, if you are not conceited, you know that at least one of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn is false. Yet you believe each of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn. This is straight inconsistency.

— Raymond M. Smullyan, What Is the Name of This Book?

Software development is more valuable when it earns money sooner and spends money later. Incremental design explicitly defers design investment until the last responsible moment in an effort to spend money later.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained