There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

Proclamations of officialness didn’t further the Net nearly so much as throwing technology out onto the Net to see what worked. And when something worked, it was adopted.

— Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”

— Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang, Accessory to War

Immanuel Kant showed us that facts only become facts within us, as part of a representation of the world constructed by our minds. Later we would discover that in addition to the filters of our senses, facts were also shaped by the knowledge and systems of values of those who perceived them. From this facts became increasingly seen as a human construction, subjective and distant from the original impression of being absolute and static entities. The old phrase “Against facts there are no arguments” lost more and more meaning. And the way you or I perceive the world is, and always will be, unique. As unique as a face.

— Marcos A. Raposo, Postmodern Flames in Brazil