Letting go of your fear of imperfection doesn’t mean you can become sloppy. Sloppy authors rarely get published—but perfect authors never do.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, Fiona Charles, Keats Kirsch, Dani Weinberg, and Earl Everett, Weinberg on Writing

…contemporary stories that are explicitly about violence have a tendency to also become stories about bureaucracy, since, after all, most acts of extreme violence either take place in bureaucratic environments (armies, prisons …) or else, they are almost immediately surrounded by bureaucratic procedures (crime).

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

The sleep of reason begets monsters

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius

Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes.… But the true analogy … is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness without turning the whole body.

— Plato, Republic