…how absolutely deranged it was, I now thought, for adults to command, and oppress, and tyrannize a child so, with complete disregard for his human nature. And for what? For some poorly conceived designs they for some reason have on his life! Oh, how many lies they told me about school. How many lies and falsities! From my most tender childhood, I was told (both in school and at home) that my entire life depends on it: that the grades I get in my seventh, eighth, ninth grade classes would determine my entire future. Oh, how many irrational fears they drilled into my mind! That I’d never get into college, that I’d never get a high paying job, unless I worked, and struggled, and crawled through the tunnels of their school curriculum.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

Few of us want to be reminded that there is a hunk of dead animal on our plate when we are served a steak. Mostly, we protect ourselves by a coy use of language and an elaborate set of conventions that allow us to maintain a double standard. The true nature of meat eating, like the true nature of sex and excretion, is only easy to refer to implicitly, hidden in euphemistic synonyms and allusions: “veal cutlets,” “making love,” “going to the bathroom.” Somehow we sense that there is soul-killing going on in slaughterhouses, but our palates don’t want to be reminded of it.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

When Fred Brooks wrote that there were no order-of-magnitude gains, he missed something. There may not be any 10x gains, but there are certainly 10x losses.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The main role of logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, highlighting and often exaggerating their force.

— Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason