What set everything going in the first place, before the Big Bang? This question terrifies the water out of us if we really grasp it. We almost instinctively grab for some pose, some ‘cause,’ crutch, drug, or religion—or even another person—that will let us ignore this hideous mystery, that will create alibis for our failure to find a purpose in life. (Although there are some who frankly don’t give a shit; they are the lucky ones.)

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius

…some developers seem to like to make things go fast, but they spend time optimizing their code before they know that it’s slow! This is like a charity sending food to rich people and saying, “We just wanted to help people!”

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

It’s not that we have less willpower than we used to, but rather that modern life immerses us daily in a set of temptations far more evolved than we are.

— Daniel Akst, Temptation

…almost every piece of software written eventually winds up being modified to solve a different problem than what it was designed for.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now