The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works. And since we know that something has worked, it’s unnecessary to keep depicting the developing world as a basket case to shake people out of their apathy—with the danger that they will think that additional support would just be throwing money down a rat hole.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…even as a relatively large organization, we were more secure in the cloud than in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data centers…

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.

— Studs Terkel, Working

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And in one place I rejoice that things are as they are

— T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think