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

Complex applications combine different types of problems, so picking the right language for each job may be more productive than trying to fit all aspects into a single language.

— Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler, NoSQL Distilled

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

…theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. But there are no free options. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game, making it a purely academic and sterile activity. But what applies to Jesus should also apply to other believers. We will see that, traditionally, there is no religion without some skin in the game.

— Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb