…an ounce of knowledge being worth a pound of information, and an ounce of understanding being worth a pound of knowledge, and an ounce of wisdom being worth a pound of understanding…

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

…other factors may be more important on the job than pure “aptitude.”

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Writing to destroy and to scandalize can be as destructive to the writer as it is to the subject.

— William Zinsser, On Writing Well

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.

— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature