Instead of thanking the Lord for what we cannot fail to have, it would be far more appropriate at mealtime to ask forgiveness for the world’s inability to prevent famines.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

The hard problems around legacy modernization are not technical problems; they’re people problems. The technology is usually pretty straightforward.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart. . .

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

An articulated guess beats an unspoken assumption.

— The Design of Design, Frederick P. Jr. Brooks