Process standardization from on high is disempowerment.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Pure mathematics is a first-rate intellectual adventure, an independent world created out of pure intelligence that is neither science nor art but somehow partakes of both.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory

The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition. It descends from what Comte, the founder of positivism, called the theological stage of human inquiry.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

…ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narratives of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry