Without the gift of love, moreover, the world can never be a home. No amount of good fortune can make it one, nor can any system of rights, however elaborate and punctiliously enforced. My rights enhance my power. They increase my self-control. But in the absence of love, they leave me to face the world alone, in the company of other anxious and self-protective men and women, for each of whom the world is only a wilderness of opportunity and risk.

— Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan

…there are two kinds of perfectionists: those who quit their projects, and those who keep working on them forever.

— Dan Charnas, Everything in Its Place

Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

SOFTWARE MANAGERS AND DEVELOPERS ARE DRAWN TO productivity tools like ants to a picnic, children to mud puddles, and late-night TV lawyers to auto accidents. Sometimes they’re drawn to productivity tools the way that drunken sailors are drawn to the sirens’ call.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development