People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

You must not design by committee.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

If two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user, then they render the same environment; if they would respond perceptibly differently to even one possible action, they render different environments.

— David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality

There’s a brilliant quote by Tony Hoare in his Turing Award speech about how there are two ways to design a system: “One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…professional mathematicians usually cite beauty as one of the main reasons they pursue mathematics.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing