What I quickly realized was that even harsh feedback makes you smarter and better at your job because it helps you think of things from different angles

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

Being an expert isn’t telling other people what you know. It’s understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction.

— Jeff Atwood, How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead

Wealth acquired by creating value for society is not equivalent to wealth that comes from economic rents. For example, a very important factor in the increasing inequality of wealth in many countries has been the increase in real estate prices. But the owner of a building, unlike the inventor of a new treatment for cancer, does not create value for society.

— Jean Tirole and Steven Rendall, Economics for the Common Good

Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

— Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland