Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator), The Idiot

The idling of men is called business; the idling of boys, though exactly like, is punished by those same men: and no one pities either boys or men.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

We, programmers, are the ones who speak to the machines and make them work. We are the ones who breathe life into them, and into our economies and societies. Nothing happens in this world without us. We—rule the world! Other people think they rule the world and then they hand those rules to us and we write the rules that execute in the machines that govern everything.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers

If you look at any list of cult characteristics, you’ll see items that could easily describe political parties and corporations—“group members encouraged to distrust outside criticism as having hidden motives,” “hierarchical authoritative structure.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

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

— Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson, Head First Design Patterns