I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. OLIVER CROMWELL [1650]

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

…the professional often commits the error of deriding the work of the amateur for not being sufficiently professional; and this error is much less excusable than that made by the amateur in underestimating the distance between himself and the professional.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

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