“The only recourse we have against bad ideas [is to] “resist the seduction of the ‘obvious’, be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know.” - Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Good Economics for Hard Times.
“If you really want a post-human future, change humans so that they don’t use wealth to measure status. But then they wouldn’t be human any more. We are mean-spirited little monkeys, capable of moments of great grace and kindness, and that story is much more plausible to me and much more beautiful than any post-human tale.” - Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (better known as the sci-fi writer James S. A. Corey) interview with Simon Ings/New Scientist.
“My mind is filled with …memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them. “Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?” the dead person might reasonably ask.” - Janet Malcolm in Six Glimpses of the Past/The New Yorker.
“People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.” - Steven Pinker ‘s description of the “moralization gap” in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
“The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life.” - Sean Carroll in The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.