Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.

— Plutarch and Bernadotte Perrin, The Complete Works of Plutarch

One possible definition of a distributed system is a system whose parts can fail independently….

— Jamie Allen, Reactive Design Patterns

Physics is a lot like sex; sure it has a practical use, but that’s not why we do it.

— Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

Political talk builds an exterior wall of words, a set of opinions built and reinforced by competitive passions: “I am this sort of person and not that.” It is a way to avoid the encounter with the difficult and humiliating social reality to which one belongs or for which one is responsible.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

We’ve always been amazed at companies that take their best engineers and — against their wishes — throw these engineers into management roles. This usually subtracts a great engineer from your team and adds a subpar manager.

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