…the primary factor preventing the adoption of an impactful Staff-plus role is the fear of creating a tyrannical architect.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other.

— James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

How much energy do they have to fight for or defend the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 (the arithmetic axiom most people think of)? Usually they observe that they have very little energy to fight for the rightness of their belief. Why? From our perspective, it’s because they know they are right and don’t need to defend this law as though their identity or ego depended on it. Next, we ask the same leaders to bring to mind an “issue” that they are fighting to be right about at work or in their private lives. It doesn’t take them long to find one. When we invite them to notice the difference between their need to defend, justify, and explain why they are right about this issue and their need to defend 2 + 2 = 4, they often have an epiphany.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

…the idea isn’t that evil is good; rather, it’s that evil is done by those who think they are doing good.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency—let alone knowledge.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice