Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitudes is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends?

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

As a leader, you should be working very intentionally to spark as much emotion and passion as you can among your team rather than worrying about running the kinds of conventional management studies that try to measure how hard or fast people are working.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money – and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.

— David Graeber, Debt

“every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy” because they learned it through play. “The lessons you learn in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the classroom.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education