Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

It is more important to reduce the effort of maintenance than it is to reduce the effort of implementation.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

Programmers may spend a long day up to their elbows in source code, but at some point they get to go home and forget about it. System administrators never quite leave the job behind…

— Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don’t accomplish any more than the eight-hour days.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Because of the importance of category systems in a social group, it is not the outsider with a “better” system who becomes king, but the insider who most thoroughly masters the internal system.

— Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking