We always spend more time maintaining and changing software than on initial development.

— Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson, Head First Design Patterns

The level of change in our industry is impressive, but my thesis is that much of this change is not really significant.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

And that’s how it always is with these beautiful, Schilleresque souls till the last moment they dress a man up in peacock’s feathers, till the last moment they hope for the good and not the bad; and though they may have premonitions of the other side of the coin, for the life of them they will not utter a real word beforehand; the thought alone makes them cringe; they wave the truth away with both hands, till the very moment when the man they’ve decked out so finely sticks their noses in it with his own two hands.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“There is no cause so good that you cannot find a fool following it,” said Larry Niven.

— Michael Shermer, Joe Carter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ronald Bailey, and Jason Kuznicki, Brain, Belief, and Politics

Designing software is not done for its own sake in XP. Design is in service of a trust relationship between technical and business people. Weekly delivery of requested functionality is the cornerstone of that relationship. It doesn’t matter what the theoretical best way to design might be. The convenience of the designers is lower on the priority list than maintaining the diverse relationships that create value within the team.

— Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained