The postmodern perception, Lyotard writes, makes no claim to be true: “Our hypotheses, therefore, should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.”

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

One of the least known facts about the LSD research in the 1960s was that the longest single research project with LSD, at Spring Grove Hospital, Maryland, showed an average 10% increase in linear IQ alone as well as the meta-programming vistas and neurogenetic awakenings popularized by the outlaw LSD culture and its gurus.

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

…writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself is invested like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design.

— Patricia Waugh, Metafiction

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

You have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, and Ian Spence e Svante Lidman , The Essence of Software Engineering