The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

…theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. But there are no free options. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game, making it a purely academic and sterile activity. But what applies to Jesus should also apply to other believers. We will see that, traditionally, there is no religion without some skin in the game.

— Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The fact that academics tell us that good process is the best way to good product should be seen as what it is: the natural tendency of a non-goal-oriented group to focus on things of interest to themselves, not necessarily of usefulness to their more goal-focused colleagues.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

— Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves

…textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions