…even if a bureaucracy is created for entirely benevolent reasons, it will still produce absurdities.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding as the rich, and perhaps more so. To argue otherwise is to libel multitudes of people who keep to decency under severe difficulties, and in the face of constant temptation.

— H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

…the value of consistency over inconsistency is almost always greater than the value of one approach over another.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

Institutions, laws, restraints and moral discipline are a part of freedom and not its enemy, and liberation from such things rapidly brings freedom to an end.

— Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

In science, we cannot prove our theories correct; we can only observe them to be incorrect. We perform these observations with well-designed and well-controlled experiments. Likewise, in software, we almost never try to prove our programs correct. Instead, we detect their incorrectness by conducting observations in the form of well-designed tests.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers