Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

— Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.

— Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

…our immediate response to the difficulty of facing the lies and falsehoods of our dearest friends and family members: to try to isolate falsehoods and lies and to limit them to our opposite number, the rich (if we are poor), the poor (if we are rich), Republicans (if we are Democrats), Democrats (if we are Republicans), etc., etc. We pretend that others are indeed swallowed by lies, but we ourselves have escaped. We imagine that our social class or group allows us special access to truth.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

It’s hard to be a role model . . . because what you really need to do is show students how imperfect people can be and still succeed.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

…it isn’t possible to provide more precision than that shown in Table 8-12—it’s only possible to lie about it or not to know any better. The imprecision isn’t a sign of a bad estimate; it’s part of the nature of software development. Failure to acknowledge imprecision is a sign of a bad estimate.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development