If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

The wholesale dealer takes no interest in the inner life of the trained pig that runs about for the truffles; all that exists for him are the results of the pig’s activity, and it is no different between us and our authorities.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

…intellectuals talk politics to advance themselves while the people they grew up with continue to live in poverty and violence.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Hope is the rainbow over the cascading brook of life, swallowed up a hundred times by the spray.

— Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science