No matter how technically proficient the individual robots are at soccer, their team’s performance will improve when they can speak to each other as if they are not preprogrammed robots but autonomous agents believing they have options.

— Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why

Different databases are designed to solve different problems. Using a single database engine for all of the requirements usually leads to non- performant solutions; storing transactional data, caching session information, traversing graph of customers and the products their friends bought are essentially different problems.

— Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler, NoSQL Distilled

The public’s belief about the alleged “Mozart” effect is a mind myth. There is almost no convincing scientific evidence to suggest that playing his piano concertos for babies will have any long-term or meaningful impact on their intelligence.

— Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil…

— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

— David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary