All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.

— Walter Scheidel, Enlightenment Now

My fundamental premise about the brain is that all its workings – what we sometimes call “mind” – are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more.

— Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

…it takes is a very small number of detractors using misplaced buzzwords of the type that makes people cringe (such as “racist”) to scare an entire institution.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Stakhanovism’s essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul.

— Bogdan Costea, Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it’s making people miserable