Since ongoing Russian terror is the price Ukrainians pay for their courage, it is outright perverse for us to use it in the satisfaction of our own psychological needs.

— Maurits de Jongh, Hannah Arendt: On the Spectre of Nuclear War

The findings from the “State of DevOps” report say that one of the leading predictors of high performance, measured in terms of throughput and stability, is the ability of teams to make their own decisions without the need to ask permission of anyone outside the team.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

Formal proof of correctness is usually infeasible; abandoning all effort at systematic verification (the more common extreme) is dangerous…

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

“No,” said the priest, “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” “A depressing opinion,” said K. “Lies are made into a universal system.”

— Franz Kafka, The Trial

mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from the butterfly to the larva, ‘The distance’, wrote Sorel, ‘from the theocrat to the mystic, and from the from the larva to the chrysalis, from the chrysalis to the butterfly.’

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox