…the higher up the chain of command you are, the more reason people have to hide things from you…

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…your team members are also like plants: some need more light, and some need more water (and some need more…fertilizer).

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator), The Idiot

The idling of men is called business; the idling of boys, though exactly like, is punished by those same men: and no one pities either boys or men.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

We, programmers, are the ones who speak to the machines and make them work. We are the ones who breathe life into them, and into our economies and societies. Nothing happens in this world without us. We—rule the world! Other people think they rule the world and then they hand those rules to us and we write the rules that execute in the machines that govern everything.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers