When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality—the interchangeability of perspectives—you get the core of morality.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

In the computer industry, it takes roughly fifteen years, on the average, from the conception of an idea to its entering the marketplace.

— Michio Kaku, Visions

…at some point something must have come from nothing…

— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

Over the first half of the 20th century, the tax grew from “unconstitutional proposal” to “tentative experiment” to “wartime necessity” to “the government’s primary funding mechanism.”

— Ben Orlin, Math With Bad Drawings

Because pure mathematics has no inherent correspondence with the outside world, we are free to make it correspond, to interpret it, in any way we choose. And it so happens—this is the interesting part—that most branches of pure mathematics can be interpreted in such a way that the axioms and theorems become approximately true statements about the external world.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory