People are often too quick to equate morale issues with character flaws. Incentives play a much larger role in who’s effective at an organization than some fanciful notion of their character.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the dumb or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows.

— Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

Activism and education exist in a fundamental tension—activism presumes to know the truth with enough certainty to act upon it, while education is conscious that it does not know for certain what is true and therefore seeks to learn more.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

If the people believe that their leaders are acting out the will of the gods, they will obey more freely and “bear with docility the yoke of the public good.”

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism