Why can’t most of our projects be fun? I think the main reason is that we don’t expect them to be.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. Without a just system, you cannot be free to do science, including science designed to better understand human identity; without science, and especially scientific understandings of human behaviors, you cannot know how to create a sustainably just system. As a consequence of this trip, I have come to understand that the pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time.

— Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger

It’s not just that some people get to break the rules—it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din?

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

A good technical argument is one that eliminates reliance on the personal authority of the speaker.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind