What does “scarce” mean? It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is.

— Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics

Bill Gates admitted: “It’s a little scary that as computer technology has moved ahead there’s never been a leader from one era who was also a leader in the next. Microsoft has been a leader in the PC era.”

— Michio Kaku, Visions

we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now