If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.

— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Even in a world where everything seems to have been done before, it is still possible to make objects that stand out in a crowd. To create anything that is easily identifiable as yours, all you have to do is let your own sense of balance and proportion, along with your own quirky way of doing things, come through into your work.

— Richard Raffan, The Art of Turned Bowls

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior.

— Corinne Purtill, The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

— Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress