Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

You are an uncivilized, ignorant, BARBARIC peasant that will be looked back upon by future generations with every bit as much pity as you regard the plague-ridden wretches of Downtown Medieval Europe.

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius

But psychologists have shown that power corrupts our mental processes almost at once. When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others’ viewpoint and more likely to center their thinking on themselves. The result is a reduced ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel. Power, among other things, induces blindness toward others.

— Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools

It was estimated in 1993 that there had been over 1000 high-level languages invented and implemented since the beginning of the 1950s.

— Charles Petzold, Code

“Without commerce, advanced social orders can’t evolve, so we’re stuck in the primitive state where every nerd fabricates everything from first principles.”

— Federico Biancuzzi, <Masterminds of Programming