Industry data says that for the best software companies in the world, two-thirds of their ideas produce zero or negative value.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

It would seem that a large proportion of our population responds with [full] attention only to threatening experiences. . . These people brush aside experiences which are non-threatening and not dangerous, as therefore not being worthy of attention or any other response, cognitive or emotional. For them, life is either a meeting of dangers or a relaxation between dangers. But there are some people for whom this is not so. These are the people who will respond not only to dangerous situations. Probably feeling more safe and secure fundamentally, they can afford the luxury of responding to, noticing, and even thrilling with experiences which are not dangerous but pleasantly exciting.

— Abraham Maslow, Cognition of the Particular and the Generic

Without the gift of love, moreover, the world can never be a home. No amount of good fortune can make it one, nor can any system of rights, however elaborate and punctiliously enforced. My rights enhance my power. They increase my self-control. But in the absence of love, they leave me to face the world alone, in the company of other anxious and self-protective men and women, for each of whom the world is only a wilderness of opportunity and risk.

— Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan

…there are two kinds of perfectionists: those who quit their projects, and those who keep working on them forever.

— Dan Charnas, Everything in Its Place

Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria