…writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself is invested like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design.

— Patricia Waugh, Metafiction

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

You have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, and Ian Spence e Svante Lidman , The Essence of Software Engineering

Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it. But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral