“The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.”

— Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense

But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.

— Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play

The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who’d want to go into that as a career?

— Peter Seibe, lCoders at Work

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

We all know a lot of very “book smart” people who can tell you all the facts and figures. But when it comes time to get their hands dirty, they’re more talk than anything. That’s because to actually apply something takes an even higher level of knowledge.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters