Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yourself a task, not completed one. For now you must try to figure out how these nondichotomous forces work in relation to one another.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

The far more common worst case is a company constrained by your personal limitations, and the only company that can tolerate being constrained by you is a company that doesn’t grow.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

…it is logically obvious that you can’t demonstrate how language always ‘goes astray’ without at the same time having a secret and contradictory trust in it. For without a pretty confident notion of the truth, how can we show that any particular stretch of language has ‘gone astray’ or fallen into contradiction?

— Postmodernism, Christopher Butler

It is true that humanity is faced with many problems. It always has been but perhaps not always with such keen awareness of them as we have today. We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had.

— Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

A solitary mind is actually a chorus.

— Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within