Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand

--- Putt's Law, from Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat (1981)

The book apparently also draws Putt's Corollary, "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." The wikipedia entry glosses this as incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management.

What is most difficult to resolve and cure is the patient’s practice of self-cure

--- psychoanalyst Masud Khan, in The Privacy of the Self, quoted by Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 194

In context (Phillips):

‘What is most difficult to resolve and cure,’ the psychoanalyst Masud Khan wrote in The Privacy of the Self, ‘is the patient’s practice of self-cure. To cure a cure is the paradox that faces us . . .’ Symptoms are always a form of self-cure; you first hear about your problem from your proposed solutions to it. The alcoholic is suffering from whatever conflict alcohol was initially a solution to, and then the solution becomes the problem. The real question is not, how can someone stop drinking, but rather what was the alcohol a self-cure for in the first case?

anxiety makes people jump to conclusions

--- Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012), p. 175

In context:

It becomes more and more difficult to be ‘originally’ mad; to avoid having a recognizable condition (and when we use the word ‘mad’ we don’t mean idiosyncratic). It is both comforting and confining — and can, indeed, be life-saving – when people in the know claim to know what we are suffering from. But mad people, as all these plays dramatize, make people jump to conclusions about them (anxiety makes people jump to conclusions); madness tempts people to be more knowing than they are. It certainly makes people work because they have something about someone that has to be dealt with (the mad are trying to make themselves impossible to ignore and impossible not to want to ignore).

Big Data (n): A system for documenting statistical coincidences

--- Martin Geddes, tweet, 21 March 2015

A ritual acts on us in a way that is deeper than words, deeper even than conscious thought.

--- Benjamin Dueholm, in "The host", Aeon Magazine, 25 November 2014

In context:

A ritual acts on us in a way that is deeper than words, deeper even than conscious thought. The words and thoughts change, after all, the scholars of religion tell us. As it is in the history of a religion, so it is in the course of a human life: the etiologies, the just-so stories, the philosophical and ideological layering all arrive late and leave early. The act itself somehow lingers underneath it all. Like a pebble in the shoe or a warm bath, it changes our minds despite our minds.

Another excerpts:

Whatever else one wishes to claim for this ritual, it is a communing with the dead. Every religious ritual is. It’s a way of putting on a self we can never be, of identifying with people otherwise lost to us, of inhabiting a past we can probably never understand. That might be the last radical lunge of this shrunken supper in a life that is starved for, if not love, then at least for connection.

If the goal of the United States is to be “ending tyranny in our world”, then is encouraging “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” the best way to go about it?

--- John Lewis Gaddis, in "Ending Tyranny," The American Interest, vol. 4, no. 1, Sep 1, 2008

In context

If that’s right, then President Bush may have proclaimed a doctrine for the 21st century comparable to the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the Truman Doctrine during the Cold War. Only historians not yet born will be able to say for sure. Even that possibility, however, should earn Bush’s memorable sentence greater scrutiny than it has so far received. For it raises an issue that future administrations—whether those of Obama, McCain or their successors—are going to have to resolve: If the goal of the United States is to be “ending tyranny in our world”, then is encouraging “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture” the best way to go about it?

A few more excerpts from the piece:

The objective of ending tyranny, therefore, is as deeply rooted in American history as it is possible to imagine. President Bush, in a time of crisis for the future of democratization, followed Lincoln’s example in a much greater crisis for the future of the Union: He looked back for guidance to the Founders.

Spreading democracy suggests knowing the answer to how people should live their lives. Ending tyranny suggests freeing them to find their own answers. The Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin best explained this distinction half a century ago in his great essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”

 But was it ever likely that democracy would root itself in those parts of the world where people fear anarchy more than they do authority? Where the struggle to survive is a more urgent priority than securing the right to vote? Where the immense power of the United States gives rise to greater uneasiness than it does reassurance?

Every gift is a demand, usually for love

--- unknown. I saw it in a piece by Martin Geddes where he said,

As a wise person once told me, “every gift is a demand, usually for love”. 

He also tweeted it a couple of times:

second in January 2015: "@nntaleb "Every gift is a demand, usually for love", so a wise person once told me."

first in May 2014: "@NurtureGirl Every gift is a demand, usually for love... Sayeth a friend's therapist."