no one is ever convinced by logic of anything important

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

…in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.

— Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh

…there’s the feeling that we keep messing it up, that maybe our communication media are such spam-filled, dick-pic-laden, Nazi-promoting cesspools because we’re somehow doing them wrong.

— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

“God” is just the name we give to the protean creative principle that generates and enforces teleology, or equivalently, that Entity whose “Will” equals teleology. Since this is the same entity whose self-structuring operations are guided by teleology, namely reality, we have a measure of equivalence between reality and God.

— Christopher Michael Langan and Chris Langan, The Art of Knowing

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now