Everybody dies. Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it’s a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It’s a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

— Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Sometimes negotiations produce the absurd situation in which customers who have no idea how to build a software system nevertheless claim to know how long it will take to build it.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Garbage collection is a horrible hack that we have accepted into our languages because we are just so bad at managing temporal couplings. If we were adept at keeping track of allocated memory, we would not depend on some nasty background process to clean up after us. But the sad fact is we are so truly terrible at managing temporal couplings that we celebrate the crutches we build to protect ourselves from them.

— Robert C. Martin, Functional Design