One of the greatest urges of the newly minted manager is to actively “manage” their employees because that’s what a manager does, right? This typically has disastrous consequences.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Whether a choice driven by these emotions is “rational” depends on whether you think that emotions are natural responses we should respect, like eating and staying warm, or evolutionary nuisances our rational powers should override.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Reality is not up to us.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Legacy modernizations themselves are anti-patterns. A healthy organization running a healthy system should be able to evolve it over time without rerouting resources to a formal modernization effort.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Heart had a predilection for judging people not by their looks or manners or political views, but almost purely by how smart he believed them to be. Or, as he liked to put it, by how many neurons per cubic centimeter their brains contained.

— Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late