No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist’s disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

Moral relativism is clearly an attempt to pay intellectual reparations for the crimes of Western colonialism, ethnocentrism, and racism.

— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

…your software project operates along four important dimensions: people, process, product, and technology.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater. The sign of doom is written on your brows - how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks? But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution. Know yourselves - be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

— Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah