Benji

“I short, the government tried to tame people's selfish nature by means of education and ritual, and when that didn't work, it tried harsh punishments to enforce norms that people knew, deep down, had social benefits. Eventually, the punishments closed the gap between the norm and the practice and the government could rely mainly on moral self-regulation instead of harsh punishment, but without completely doing away with laws that served as last-resort checks on selfish and dangerous behavior. More or less as Xunzi would have recommended: Best to rely on informal means of regulation that transform people's selfish tendencies, and if that doesn't work, use the strong arm of the law.”
― Daniel A. Bell, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University

“Experienced readers could engage in consultation reading even without an index or a table of contents, given the predictable order in which topics were generally treated in various genres. For example, al-Juzajani, the biographer of the great medical scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), reported on the reading habits of this autodidact: 'One of the remarkable things about the Master was that for the twenty-five years that I was his companion and servant, I did not once see him, when he came across a new book, examine it from beginning to end. Rather he would go directly to its difficult passages and intricate problems and look at what its author had to say about them.”
― Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

“Bringing a major drug forward, bringing it out of discovery and into development, then out of development and into the market, bringing it to patients and changing their lives, is ... the hardest thing that humans do,' Boger said. 'Putting a man on the moon? Not ... so ... hard. Engineering is an amazing discipline, but it's also a discipline that succumbs every single solitary time to time and effort. If you give me twenty years and a half trillion dollars, I guarantee I can put people on Mars and bring them back. I guarantee it. Any of you could guarantee it. But making a new drug that changes people's lives is almost beyond human understanding.”
― Barry Werth, The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma

“When he was young, and his mind supple, he was able to balance both these mechanisms; the steam of their dissonance drove the turbine of his art. As he grew older, the first one - especially the self-awareness - started to fail, and he leaned increasingly heavily on the second. Forced to bear the entire weight of his wounded psyche, it started showing more and more cracks, until eventually he ended up as a podcaster - the surest sign of a deranged mind.”
― Scott Alexander