I once asked one of my students why, at gatherings, students would sooner look at their phones than talk to one another. “Oh,” he said, “it’s so much easier not to engage!” Encounter involves a risk. It provides inevitable, constant pain as the price for its real satisfactions.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Simply by labeling a new regulatory measure “deregulation,” you can frame it in the public mind as a way to reduce bureaucracy and set individual initiative free, even if the result is a fivefold increase in the actual number of forms to be filled in, reports to be filed, rules and regulations for lawyers to interpret, and officious people in offices whose entire job seems to be to provide convoluted explanations for why you’re not allowed to do things.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

…software engineers are socialized around the idea that their discipline is so difficult, nonengineers are incapable of understanding even the most basic concepts. Resistance from the nontechnical side of an organization tends to be dismissed as ignorance.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

‘Von Neumann, when I was there at Princeton, was under extreme pressure,’ says Benoît Mandelbrot, who had come to the IAS in 1953 at von Neumann’s invitation, ‘from mathematicians, who were despising him for no longer being a mathematician; by the physicists, who were despising him for never having been a real physicist; and by everybody for having brought to Princeton this collection of low-class individuals called “programmers”’.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future