…math can be taught in a way that stifles its beauty. Learning math as a bunch of rules without meaning-making insights or as an endless stream of repetitive problems that lack joyful resolution is a surefire way to sap desire.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

Is it not curious that anthropologists who claim to be cultural relativists seldom hesitate to pass strong moral judgments on aspects of their own culture which they find distasteful?

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

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