Remember, no one wants to suck at their job. Popular culture sells the myth about lazy, stupid, uncaring bureaucrats. It’s easy to dismiss people that way. Buying into the idea that those kinds of problems are really character flaws means you don’t have to recognize that you’ve created an environment where people feel trapped. They are caught between conflicting incentives with no way to win.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

At its core, all engineering comes down to making tradeoffs between the perfect and the workable.

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

…flimsy knowledge about the criteria of beauty does not render futile the task of distinguishing good from bad art.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Users become attached to their programs and system software. Software is expensive. Getting it to function properly often takes time. Software that works is precious. Users don’t idly discard it.

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

For people are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game