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

The thought that there is one and only one complete true account of everything is deep in the Western tradition. It descends from what Comte, the founder of positivism, called the theological stage of human inquiry.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions