…contemporary stories that are explicitly about violence have a tendency to also become stories about bureaucracy, since, after all, most acts of extreme violence either take place in bureaucratic environments (armies, prisons …) or else, they are almost immediately surrounded by bureaucratic procedures (crime).

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

The sleep of reason begets monsters

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius

Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes.… But the true analogy … is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness without turning the whole body.

— Plato, Republic

I’ve sometimes found that executives, seeking to refresh and expand their business, instead of trying to understand what that core is, look to cool technologies. They hope to gain market share by moving to the cloud, or by incorporating machine learning or block-chains, often without a clear sense of the problem being solved.

— Daniel Jackson, The Essence of Software