…professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

Inventors and geniuses, at the beginning of their careers (and very often at the end as well), have almost always been regarded in society as no more than fools—that is a most routine observation, well known to everyone.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

The likely goal of this initiative is not to produce great programmers but rather to increase software company profits by flooding the market with large numbers of poor programmers, which will drive down wages.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

Who can be certain that “original work” that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or by the effect of following well-known general principles?

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I