Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

…being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity—because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…so the history of modern politics has been a history of finding the right balance between the order brought about by living in a society based on the rule of law, and that rule becoming so draconian as to stifle our freedoms.

— Michael Shermer, Joe Carter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ronald Bailey, and Jason Kuznicki, Brain, Belief, and Politics

My grandfather had no time to notice that he was getting old. He had too much work to do . . .

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

There seems to be no way out of this paradox—the better job a programming language does for the special purpose for which it was designed, the more limiting it is on the minds of those who use it, if they are faced with potentially new areas of application.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming