Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or, unless his memory be hurt by disease or ill constitution of organs, excellently foolish. For words are wise men’s counters—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

…consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource. Consensus building takes meetings, lots of meetings. Meetings take time, lots of time. Great designers are few and far between; their time is exceedingly precious.

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

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

A small but typical example of how ‘philosophy’ sends out new shoots is to be found in the case of Georg Cantor, a nineteenth-century German mathematician. His research on the subject of infinity was at first written off by his scientific colleagues as mere ‘philosophy’ because it seemed so bizarre, abstract and pointless. Now it is taught in schools under the name of set-theory.

— Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason

The word Refactoring should never appear on a schedule. Refactoring is not the kind of activity that appears on a plan. We do not reserve time for refactoring. Refactoring is simply part of our minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour approach to writing software.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Agile