…the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness. The list of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association tripled between 1952 and 1994, when it included almost three hundred disorders, including Avoidant Personality Disorder (which applies to many people who formerly were called shy), Caffeine Intoxication, and Female Sexual Dysfunction. The number of symptoms needed to justify a diagnosis has fallen, and the number of stressors that may be credited with triggering one has increased.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and capricious the human intellect is.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

Let a parent try punching the principal, and we’ll see how far “It doesn’t matter who started it” gets in front of a judge.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

…[incompleteness theorems] apply to axiomatic formal systems or computers in which one can do arithmetic. Thus, they do not apply to many kinds of texts, such as religious texts—the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Buddhist sutras—and typically not even to theories in the natural sciences.

— Richard Tieszen, Simply Gödel

What set everything going in the first place, before the Big Bang? This question terrifies the water out of us if we really grasp it. We almost instinctively grab for some pose, some ‘cause,’ crutch, drug, or religion—or even another person—that will let us ignore this hideous mystery, that will create alibis for our failure to find a purpose in life. (Although there are some who frankly don’t give a shit; they are the lucky ones.)

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius