Programmers may spend a long day up to their elbows in source code, but at some point they get to go home and forget about it. System administrators never quite leave the job behind…

— Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don’t accomplish any more than the eight-hour days.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Because of the importance of category systems in a social group, it is not the outsider with a “better” system who becomes king, but the insider who most thoroughly masters the internal system.

— Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

In the absence of any other information about two seemingly well-meaning individuals, differences as subtle as accents can impact a willingness to learn.

— David DeSteno, The Truth About Trust

…if you already believe in free will, then you should want to know as much as possible about how it works, and if you don’t, then you have no choice but to resign yourself to your fate and read up on it anyway.

— Christopher Michael Langan and Chris Langan, The Art of Knowing