Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, “Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

…in the wake of the deadliest war that the world had ever known one did not have to be a game theorist to favour preventing another – even by the brutal means of an atom-bombing campaign that left millions of Russians dead.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

I have individual subjects in whom apparent basic-need-gratification is compatible with “existential neurosis,” meaninglessness, valuelessness, or the like.

— Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

…the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

— Jordan B. Peterson, Norman Doidge (Forward), Ethan Van Sciver (Illustrator), 12 Rules for Life