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

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down ― the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer