We also know the kind of ill mental health and neurosis that can arise in the person who attempts to guard against his subconscious compulsions at all costs, by means of only his conscious faculties.

— Roman Gelperin, Addiction, Procrastination, and Laziness

Call no man happy until he is dead

— Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

…the primary factor preventing the adoption of an impactful Staff-plus role is the fear of creating a tyrannical architect.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other.

— James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

How much energy do they have to fight for or defend the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 (the arithmetic axiom most people think of)? Usually they observe that they have very little energy to fight for the rightness of their belief. Why? From our perspective, it’s because they know they are right and don’t need to defend this law as though their identity or ego depended on it. Next, we ask the same leaders to bring to mind an “issue” that they are fighting to be right about at work or in their private lives. It doesn’t take them long to find one. When we invite them to notice the difference between their need to defend, justify, and explain why they are right about this issue and their need to defend 2 + 2 = 4, they often have an epiphany.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership