But he knows that his freedom from company clocks doesn’t stem from corporate altruism. “They don’t want us to know how many hours we work. If we did, they’d have to pay us a lot more….

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

It is easy to become captive to words, to treat them as though they truly and fully convey genuine knowledge—as though they are real cash money, legal tender, accepted everywhere at their face value, rather than mere counters.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Superior tools only prolong the life of inferior languages.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Left to their own devices, software engineers will proliferate tools, ignoring feature overlaps for the sake of that one thing tool X does better than tool Y that is relevant only in that specific situation.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Starting with “What will offend no one?” may avoid taking sides but rarely leads to the truth.

— Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language