The likely goal of this initiative is not to produce great programmers but rather to increase software company profits by flooding the market with large numbers of poor programmers, which will drive down wages.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

Who can be certain that “original work” that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or by the effect of following well-known general principles?

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

Christianity makes life worth living for the weak. It recasts the reactive lives of the weak – ruled over, dependent, passive – as the pinnacle of human achievement.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.

— Edsger W.Dijkstra, How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?

Every civilized society has to carry below the sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty, crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great, central section of the masses, a great body which . . . lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. . . . It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed-ideas and prejudices. It is affected in its mores from the classes above it.

— William Graham Sumner, Folkways