It’s not that we have less willpower than we used to, but rather that modern life immerses us daily in a set of temptations far more evolved than we are.

— Daniel Akst, Temptation

…almost every piece of software written eventually winds up being modified to solve a different problem than what it was designed for.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

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