Wallace was wrong to say that “you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Employee turnover costs about 20 percent of all manpower expense. But that’s only the visible cost of turnover. There is an ugly invisible cost that can be far worse.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was unsupported by these fine, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the ‘disciplines’ such as exams, hospitals, prisons, the regulation of workshops, schools, the army.

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of language games there is no commensurability; there are no criteria of truth transcending local discourses, but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation.

— Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self

…monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens