…unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

What this has taught me I think all of us had better learn. There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers. This can certainly give us hope for the future of the species even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

— Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

When we’re focused on the search for truth, we’ll begin by doubting the existence of the objects of sense-perception and imagination. There are two reasons for this: (1) We have occasionally found our senses to be in error, and it’s not wise to place much trust in anyone or anything that has deceived us even once. (2) In our sleep we regularly seem to see or imagine things that don’t exist anywhere; and while we are doubting there seem to be no absolutely reliable criteria to distinguish being asleep from being awake.

— Rene Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy

Millions of pages of Inspector General reports can attest that when a government bureaucracy finds a broken rule, like Medusa it grows three more rules in its place.

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

…all they need to do is change the culture, rules, and practices that they have spent years building and that have always made them successful in the past. Yeesh.

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud