To accept anything as true means to incur the risk of error. If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimise the risk of error but I maximise, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.

— E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

When you read bad guiding policies, you think, “so what?” because its found a way to justify entrenching the status quo. When you read good guiding policies, you think, “Ah, that’s really going to annoy Anna, Bill, and Claire,” because the approach takes a clear stance on competing goals.

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

Instead of feeling like you are the computer genius, descending from computer heaven to save your poor customer from purgatory, turn the tables around. If you’re, for example, working in the insurance industry, think of your customer as a subject matter expert in insurance from which you have to learn in order to get your job done.

— Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer

“I guess a little healthy competition won’t hurt them,” he or she will tell you. Over the years, I have come to believe that this kind of competition is almost never explicitly designed into an organization; rather, it happens without anyone really wanting it. And the manager who excuses it (who almost seems to be taking credit for it) is a sad example of the self-deluding authoritarian who assumes that anything that happens must necessarily have been exactly what he/she intended to happen.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

I often told them that I had had a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow; that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without tears… that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them? and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why could I not love them without hating them?

— Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man