Thus I dispelled the diseased notion of selflessness, observing introspectively that the reasons behind all my actions, even those done for other people, were invariably rooted in my own self, and that it was psychologically impossible for it to be otherwise. And because these same psychological factors that existed in me also existed in all other people (as well as animals), I could see that absolutely all actions were at their core selfish, and that this universally accepted and commonly used concept of selflessness (as the opposite of, and mutually exclusive from, selfishness) simply didn’t exist in reality.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

…gathering is about connection, but it’s also about power, pretending power dynamics don’t exist will make you a less artful gatherer.

— Priya Parker, The Art of the Gathering

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

— Martin Meadows, 365 Days With Self-Discipline

…it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.” As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are “his own thoughts” and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naïvety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot