When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy … A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself …

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

There is only one generic way to protect your system from failing as a whole when a part fails: distribute and compartmentalize.

— Jamie Allen, Reactive Design Patterns

An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. Teams with fewer than four individuals are a sufficiently leaky abstraction that they function indistinguishably from individuals.

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

Published collections of successful models can be helpful, as discussed in Chapter 11, but we shouldn’t get sidetracked trying to reduce domain modeling to a cookbook or a toolkit. Modeling and design call for creativity.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés…

— William Zinsser, On Writing Well