If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

I think Thompson and Ritchie did the world a disservice by not defining the pretty-print presentation for C. Saying, “This is how we do it, but you can do it some other way,” has had a huge toll on humanity, and it will probably continue to always have one.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

While some on the far right might want to halt progress or even consider it to have gone too far already, and some on the far left consider progress a myth and insist that life in liberal democracies is still as oppressive as it ever has been (thanks, Foucault), liberalism both appreciates progress and is optimistic that it will continue.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

— Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

Product design and release processes cannot turn good designers into great ones. They rarely produce great designs without a great designer. But the disciplines imposed can bring up the low end of the design curve and improve the average performance of the art.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design