…to try to specify all that a program should do, you get specifications that are themselves so complicated that you’re no longer confident that they say what you intended.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had common interests, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic wholes, and that financiers were an alien, parasitical force, and drove them to their ultimate, murderous extreme.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

We don’t start out with a moral duty to “reduce bias,” simply because biases are bad and evil and Just Not Done. This is the sort of thinking someone might end up with if they acquired a deontological duty of “rationality” by social osmosis, which leads to people trying to execute techniques without appreciating the reason for them.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes