The folly of engineering culture is that we are often ashamed of signing up our organization for a future rewrite by picking the right architecture for right now, but we have no misgivings about producing systems that are difficult for others to understand and therefore impossible to maintain.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

We do not know whether the language designers are geniuses, or we ordinary programmers are cripples.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

The ancient, esoteric piece of wisdom he gleaned from his prison years was this: unrestrained power over people makes you cruel! Those placed in a position of power over another person (the informer over the informed upon, the interrogator over the interrogated, the high-ranking trusty over the general laborer), in which they have no cause to fear any negative consequences from doing him violence, unavoidably act on their evil desires—when it is to their advantage (or when the mood strikes them)—unless they restrain themselves morally. And “the cruelty they manifest,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “is proportionate to the defenselessness of the person in their power.” By means of repeated cruel actions over time, cruelty becomes second-nature to them, a stable and durable trait of their personalities.

— Roman Gelperin, On Rotting Prison Straw

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