The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

You know you’re not the only one who has to accept things you don’t necessarily like, right? It’s part of the human condition.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla calls tyrannophilia.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think