An optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears that this is so.

— Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar…

…if you constantly interrupt your task to check email or respond to an IM text message, your effective IQ drops ten points.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

…if you’re a member of the ruling class, it’s very much in your interests to say, “Now, now, let’s put aside your selfish interest in having your own way and just enjoy one another’s company. Let’s take a negotiating posture toward one another, shall we?” Such counsel leaves the world as it is, and disarms demands for justice.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

…people tend to judge technologies—and many other problems—by an overall good or bad feeling.

— How to Actually Change Your Mind, Eliezer Yudkowsky

Change and reinvention require a commodity that is absent in our time as it never has been before. That commodity—the catalytic ingredient of all change—is slack. Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack