…as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure you’re exploring virgin territory is to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

The truth is, we don’t know yet the extent to which egoism can be curbed by education and other environmental forces. What we do know is this: Society is poorly served by a government that leaves business entirely alone, and even more poorly served by a government that takes all business over.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Chance favors the prepared mind.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies (“My people are too dumb to build systems without them” ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run.

— Tom DeMarco and Timothy R. Lister, Peopleware