In any academic field, there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren’t. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than how important it is for getting good results.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Everything in software changes. The requirements change. The design changes. The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is our inability to cope with change.

— Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained

Whether it is right or wrong is purely accidental. Although it is possible that any particular belief can be true, it is not, from an evolutionary perspective, necessary that any beliefs be true.

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

The mistake is that…it’s not just a logical deduction, but, so to speak, a deduction that has turned into a feeling. Not all natures are the same; for many, a logical deduction sometimes turns into the strongest feeling, which takes over their whole being, and which it is very difficult to drive out or alter. To cure such a person, it’s necessary in that case to change the feeling itself, which can be done only by replacing it with another equally strong. That is always difficult, and in many cases, impossible.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent

Complexity isn’t caused by a single catastrophic error; it accumulates in lots of small chunks.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design