Understanding the trade-offs that we face is a vital, fundamental aspect of engineering decision-making. If we make our system more secure, it will be more difficult to use; if we make it more distributed, we will spend more time integrating the information that it gathers. If we add more people to speed up development, we will increase the communication overhead, coupling, and complexity, all of which will slow us down.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

…the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.

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

In such markets, the quality difference between best and second best is often barely perceptible, but the corresponding difference in rewards can be enormous.

— Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck

With the recent ascendancy of the Tea Party movement and the media coverage of angry white men, liberals understandably believe that things are grim and getting worse. But, in fact, Pinker notes that “in every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions—interracial marriage, the empowerment of women, the tolerance of homosexuality, the punishment of children, and the treatment of animals—the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”

— Michael Shermer, Joe Carter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ronald Bailey, and Jason Kuznicki, Brain, Belief, and Politics

The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery› that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a “competence,” as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.

— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying