As Thomas Hobbes observed in the 17th century, life under mob rule is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Life on a poorly run software project is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and hardly ever short enough.

— Steve McConnell, Software Project Survival Guide

Early Egyptologists were genuinely shocked to find no trace whatsoever of Hebrew tribes having ever been in Egypt—they weren’t expecting to find a record of the Ten Plagues, but they expected to find something.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million. Moreover, the phenomenon of pseudo plagiarism becomes inevitable—the unintentional repetition of the ideas of others who are unknown.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

…old Japanese proverb, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

We programmers are weird creatures. We love writing code. But when it comes to reading it we usually shy away. After all, writing code is so much more fun, and reading code is hard — sometimes almost impossible.

— Kevlin Henney, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know