In my experience most of the complexities which are encountered in systems work are symptoms of organizational malfunctions. Trying to model this reality with equally complex programs is actually to conserve the mess instead of solving the problems.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month

When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

All you have to do to succeed in software is to consistently suck less with every release.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces – these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths – side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox