If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

— Jeff Atwood, Effective Programming

Process standardization from on high is disempowerment.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Pure mathematics is a first-rate intellectual adventure, an independent world created out of pure intelligence that is neither science nor art but somehow partakes of both.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory

The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition. It descends from what Comte, the founder of positivism, called the theological stage of human inquiry.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

…ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narratives of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality