If you think you can’t do a thing, you will not be able to do it. If you think you can do something, then you have a chance of achieving it. Believing doesn’t mean you will instantly be able to, but you’ve got to believe that you can, otherwise you definitely won’t be able to do it. I’ve seen a number of people who I thought could do something brilliant and creative but they didn’t seem to believe in themselves and therefore didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.

— Eddie Izzard, Believe Me

Everyone should feel comfortable being their authentic self. This phrase, while popular, presupposes that the cost of being authentic is the same for everyone. The truth of the matter is that not everyone can reveal themselves without paying a social price, which in some cases is a price too high to pay.

— Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language

Well-run organizations value you for what you’re good at. Less well-run companies value you for your identity.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

You were born too late to remember a time when the rise of totalitarianism seemed unstoppable, when one country after another fell to secret police and the thunderous knock at midnight, while the professors of free universities hailed the Soviet Union’s purges as progress.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

— Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland