In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

…in most circumstances, if you bring together a crowd of people, that crowd will, as a group, behave less intelligently, and less creatively, than any single member of the crowd is likely to do if on their own.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

A solution that involves a eureka moment is generally very difficult, if not impossible, to derive systematically through a computation because it requires reasoning on a subtle level about objects and their properties.

— Martin Erwig, Once Upon an Algorithm

Great music is valid metaphysics.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Maybe that’s precisely what quantum physics or metaphysics is telling us. If we exist, that means we’re being watched. There is something or someone that never lets us out of its sight.

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow