…some of our most common tools are more like anchors than propellers.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

Coupling, like the Lego piece in the night, often isn’t obvious until you step on it.

— Kent Beck, Tidy First?

If you can’t admit to yourself that you’ve done better than others—or if you’re ashamed of wanting to do better than others—then the median will forever be your concrete wall, the place where you stop moving forward.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

If men had always tried to deal with the problem of love in terms of known human rather than of grotesquely imagined divine interests, there would have been less “making of eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” less persecution of “sinners,” less burning and imprisoning of the heretics of “unnatural” love, less Grundyism, less Comstockery, and, at the same time, less dirty Don Juanism, less of that curiously malignant and vengeful love-making so characteristic of the debauchee under a Christian dispensation. Reacting against the absurdities of the old mythology, the young have run into absurdities no less inordinate at the other end of the scale.

— Aldous Huxley, Huxley trusts and heirs, The Genius and the Goddess

Anybody could afford to bring a personal computer home, free from the oversight and advice of more experienced programmers and the methodology of an engineering company, and start programming on their own. And they did just that, in large numbers, learning nothing from the past and reinventing everything, over and over. Both literally and figuratively, we never looked back. Independent software companies thrived while the software divisions of hardware companies shrank, so that the modern software industry was created by people who had never been exposed to engineering rigor.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software