…the idea isn’t that evil is good; rather, it’s that evil is done by those who think they are doing good.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency—let alone knowledge.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

Developers can be motivated by technically inept managers as long as those managers recognize that they are technically inept and confine their control of the project to nontechnical decisions.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

“Standards should be discovered, not decreed,” said one computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction. Seldom has it worked any other way.

— Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

— G. K. Chesterton , Orthodoxy