…if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

The manager comes to see all relationships with others by a strict utilitarian calculus and, insofar as he dares, breaks friendships and alliances accordingly.

— Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes

…if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’…

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Can human beings thrive and be fulfilled in the absence of a transcendent order capable of giving an objective foundation to meaning, morals, purpose, and hope?

— Stephen Anderson, Hap & Happiness