The good craftsmen seemed to have the same fault as the poets: each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in other most important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadows the wisdom they had.

— Plato, The Apology

Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product’ as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

The central limit theorem is truly a miracle of nineteenth-century mathematics. Think about it: even though the path of any individual ball is unpredictable, the path of 1,000 balls is extremely predictable…

— Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why

In teaching programming and software engineering over the last thirty years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the determinant of success when you’re developing software isn’t whether you use the latest programming languages and tools, or the management process you follow (agile or otherwise), or even how you structure the code. It’s simply whether you know what you are trying to do.

— Daniel Jackson, The Essence of Software