But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

…intelligence is one of life’s most effective instruments for masking inborn traits, once it decides that such a course is desirable.

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

Looking for absolute truths in situations that are ambiguous and value-based is painful. Sometimes it helps just to highlight the fact that the disagreement is really over what to optimize for, rather than pure technical correctness.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. And if everyone took enough classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we’d all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficacy of a professor.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

…to try to specify all that a program should do, you get specifications that are themselves so complicated that you’re no longer confident that they say what you intended.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work