Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing…

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Good programming is not born from mere technical competence. I’ve seen highly intellectual programmers who can produce intense and impressive algorithms, who know their language standard by heart, but who write the most awful code.

— Kevlin Henney, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

The artist worthy of the name is one who cultivates a ‘hatred of sentiment, of sensibility, of finer feelings, a hatred for what is inconstant, changeable, vague, superstitious…

— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

The evidence is clear and overwhelming that both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence.

— Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools