Gathering concrete data is the best way for developers to vet the approach; remember the adage that demonstration defeats discussion.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

…many benefactors of mankind, who did not inherit power but seized it for themselves, ought to have been executed at their very first steps. But those men endured their steps, and therefore they were right…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

…the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

…people tend to act the way you treat them, so if you treat them like children or prisoners, don’t be surprised when that’s how they behave.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

A dissenter could indeed refuse to do work that might end up in the hands of soldiers: that would mean, in effect, not being a computer engineer.

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine