Wishful thinking isn’t just optimism. It’s closing your eyes and hoping something works when you have no reasonable basis for thinking it will. Wishful thinking at the beginning of a project leads to big blowups at the end of a project. It undermines meaningful planning and may be at the root of more software problems than all other causes combined.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

DRY is excellent advice within the context of a single function, service, or module. It is good advice; beyond that, I would extend DRY to the scope of a version control repository or a deployment pipeline. It comes at a cost, though. Sometimes this is a very significant cost when applied between services or modules, particularly if they are developed independently. The problem is that the cost of having one canonical representation of any given idea across a whole system increases coupling, and the cost of coupling can exceed the cost of duplication.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

The disadvantage of believing that all programming languages are equivalent is that it’s not true. But the advantage is that it makes your life a lot simpler.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Rationality is not for winning debates, it is for deciding which side to join.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind