A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought

 --- Samuel Palmer, British landscape painter, etcher, and printmaker, via the Ashmolean Museum Instagram feed, 27 Jan 2021

A self-portrait of Palmer in the Ashmolean
that was painted when he was nineteen

For more quotes by Palmer, see AZ Quotes

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler

 --- Tony Stark, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); the archetypal tech entrepreneur on his relationship to leadership (archetypally, the Ruler)

From https://www.quotes.net/mquote/974240 

Maria Hill:

All set up boss.

Tony Stark:

Actually he's the boss.

[points to Captain America]

Tony Stark:

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler.

Serial faileur

 --- Pierre de Vries, Blogger "About Me" statement until Jan 7, 2021

Full description

Serial faileur. Not good enough at particle physics; quit venture capital; dropped out of art school; left the software industry; got bored with technology policy. Currently thinking about high tech and myth.

potency as a source of meaning and [a] potential for zealotry are naturally correlated

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), p. 177

Quote in context: after citing critiques by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and David French in the National Review:

Yet social justice's most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated. Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.

Cui bono?

 --- attributed to Lucius Cassius by Cicero, according to Wikipedia:

L. Cassius ille, quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat, identidem in causis quaerere solebat, cui bono fuisset?

Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: "to whom might it be for a benefit?"

—Cicero: Pro Roscio Amerino, §§ 84, 86