Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.

— Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

In practice you can never completely eliminate reliance on authority. Good authorities are more likely to know about any counterevidence that exists and should be taken into account; a lesser authority is less likely to know this, which makes their arguments less reliable.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.

— Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise

How do you know that you know the stuff you think you know? Take away the option of answering, “I just do!” and what’s left is epistemology.

— Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. . .

José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses—is that education may not keep pace with extensions of the franchise, that ignorant voting will substitute a rule by boobs for a rule by the wise. Uneducated masses, Thomas Hobbes reminded us, are as easily influenced by the flummery and flattery of politicians as any ruler is influenced by similar tactics on the part of advisors.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener