The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’… This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Hegel’s place historically is to have institutionalized four theses in nineteenth-century metaphysics. 1. Reality is an entirely subjective creation; 2. Contradictions are built into reason and reality; 3. Since reality evolves contradictorily, truth is relative to time and place; and 4. The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit.

— Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

Don Quixote’s madness was his refusal to accept the world as it appears to those who see only the world’s back, who smell only the world’s perspiration. Men and women of faith, in their madness, affirm both a compassionate God and a life after death in spite of evidence which suggests (though of course it does not prove) that both affirmations are delusions.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Well-Estimated Project If the estimation inputs and process are well-defined, arbitrarily changing the output is not a rational action. Project stakeholders might not like the output, but the appropriate corrective action is to adjust the inputs (for example, reduce the project’s scope) and to recalculate the outputs, not just to change the output to a different answer.

— Steve McConnell, Software Estimation

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game