If you want to drive motivation to less than zero, try soliciting the team’s input to whitewash a decision after you’ve already made it.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

The fact that, for example, the link between smoking and lung cancer was first discovered by Nazi doctors (Proctor, 2000) doesn’t mean we should tell people that smoking is healthy after all.

— Stuart Ritchie, Intelligence

The idea that everything in the world has meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

…your potential ability to write good software is limited only by your ability to conceive of helping another.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems