Abraham Lincoln used to ask this riddle: “If we call tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” When the respondent could answer “five,” Lincoln would admonish, “No, four. Calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Yes, harping on every small detail, particularly when you’re confident about your field of expertise, can be annoying, trying, and frustrating. But it’s also dramatically effective in cutting down on mistakes and even major catastrophes.

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human.

— Aristotle, Politics

…if F is finitist mathematics then there is no way to prove the consistency of F using F.

— Richard Tieszen, Simply Gödel

According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.

— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene