History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been discovered, and the concepts in current use – ‘cause’, ‘accident’, ‘genius’ – explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance.

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

To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.

— Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.

— Camille Fournier, The Manager’s Path

Mapping the trajectory of a spacecraft is a relatively straightforward business, bounded only by the laws of physics. Mapping the trajectory of an idea through a political system, on the other hand, can be a dicey business.

— Robert Zubrin, Case for Mars

We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other—call these “floating” beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens’s ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory