Morality and belief in supernatural are mostly independent. (You can get Stage One morality from believing in God, but that's it.)

It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet points and bragging rights?

It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

...

An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

-- Jay Hanlon, Five year retrospective on StackOverflow

Expressed in pictures rather than words, but a great example of how to respond to humanity-threatening calamities:

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html?Bonjour

Sidenote: Almost every Minus comic is wonderful, and there aren't that many of them (you can read the whole series in an hour).

Why spend a dollar on a bookmark? ... Why not use the dollar as a bookmark?

It will fall out. Apart from that, money isn't particularly clean and (especially if considering US currency) not particularly pretty either. I expect people to find a bookmark far more aesthetically pleasing than a note.

How is this a rationality quote? It is rationality-neutral at best.

But you don't have to be perfect to be the right person in a team, and you don't have to be "the" right person to be an asset to a team. People with low self-confidence plus low social confidence (plus possibly moralistic ideas about self-reliance) will try to self-improve through their own efforts rather than seeking help, regardless of how much less effective it is, believing they're not worth someone else's attention yet, or being afraid of owing someone, or whatever; quotes like Steinem's reinforce that.

...Maybe. I don't have any actual sources, so I could be totally wrong. Still, I'm not sure I like the focus on "being" rather than doing things.

Why spend a dollar on a bookmark? ... Why not use the dollar as a bookmark?

-Steven Spielberg

I read that as "looking for the right person to fall in love with". Then the sense is "be the right person for someone else". But that achieves a different goal entirely, since it doesn't make the other person right for you.

There are many cases where you want a different person right for the task.

Name three!

Romantic partners (inherently), trading and working partners (allowing you to specialize in your comparative advantage), deputies and office-holders (allowing you to deputize), soldiers (allowing you to send someone else to their death to win the war).

I think the point is not that endings are generally and extrinsically sad, but rather that by definition, an ending is a thing which is sad, if we take the existence of such a thing to be good. (The ending of a bad thing, for example, is an exception, though generally because it allows for the existence of good things). The response, then, would not to be to try to improve endings, but rather to try to do away with them (and, barring that, improve the extrinsic qualities of the non-ending parts).

I just think it's good to be confident. If I'm not on my team why should anybody else be?

-Robert Downey Jr.

Far too few people limit their aspirations to what they can accomplish working alone.