The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population. The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…committee specification is why large and super-ambitious software systems seem so prone to total disaster.

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

If you deliver that faultless and definitive report to your organization, you’ve probably waited too long.

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

You need to spend evenings, weekends, and holidays educating yourself, therefore you cannot spend your evenings, weekends, and holidays working overtime on your current project.

— Kevlin Henney, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

By the mid-1960s, the nation’s total R&D expenditures would account for 3 percent of the gross national product, a benchmark that was both a symbol of progress and a goal for other countries.

— Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late