It is one of the ironies of modern intellectual life that many scholars insist that rationality is impotent, that our efforts at reasoning are at best a smoke screen to justify selfish motivations and irrational feelings. And to make this point, these scholars write books and articles complete with complex chains of logic, citations of data, and carefully reasoned argument. It’s like someone insisting that there is no such thing as poetry—and making this case in the form of a poem.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

The pleasurable act of dreaming seems to let us fulfill our wishes in our minds, sapping our energy to perform the hard work of meeting the challenges in real life.

— Gabrielle Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking

it is precisely because we tell our children what to value—money, value for money, status, beauty, power, etc.—that they learn to lose sight of what makes them truly happy.

— Raj Raghunathan, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?

Wer Ordnung hält, ist nur zu faul zum Suchen. (If you keep things tidily ordered, you’re just too lazy to go searching.) German proverb…

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

…experiments comparing the effects of genuine drugs as compared to those of sugar pills show that between 60 percent and 90 percent of drugs depend, to some extent, on the placebo effect for their effectiveness.

— Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds