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

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

— Jeff Atwood, Effective Programming

Process standardization from on high is disempowerment.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Pure mathematics is a first-rate intellectual adventure, an independent world created out of pure intelligence that is neither science nor art but somehow partakes of both.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory