The mistake you make, don’t you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself.

— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

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