“every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy” because they learned it through play. “The lessons you learn in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the classroom.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education

Focusing on the “self” gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?

— Bogdan Costea, Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it’s making people miserable

At least a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

A year and a half’s FY2019 proposed funding for the Department of Defense roughly equals the entire run of NASA funding across the agency’s sixty-year history.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang, Accessory to War

‘If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,’ von Neumann once said, ‘it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.’

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future