There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

“industry best practice.” Its purpose is to shield the pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is “industry best practice,” and the company loses, he can’t be blamed. He didn’t choose, the industry did.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

…in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, there was a tacit understanding in much of the industrialized world that if productivity in a certain enterprise improved, a certain share of the increased profits would be redistributed to the workers in the form of improved wages and benefits. Since the eighties, this is no longer the case.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs