An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

You can dismiss any claim of an ability to improve productivity by more than 25 percent per year out of hand as a silver-bullet claim.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…the medium that remains after all your rigid bans may well turn out to be flexible enough to fashion precisely the items you’ve banned.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

It is greatly to America’s advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness — that it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization-a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

— Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence