Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Every rationalist doubts, but not all doubts are rational. Wearing doubts doesn’t make you a rationalist any more than wearing a white medical lab coat makes you a doctor.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

…our mad rush toward the new, we tend to discard much of the old. (For example, software’s newest and most popular methodologies, like Extreme and Agile, tend to make a point of rejecting the accumulated wisdom of the older methodologies.)

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

As a rule of thumb, I estimate that a programming product costs at least three times as much as a debugged program with the same function.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month