The better that you understand the most fundamental level of your field, the easier it will be to learn the next level.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

Development is always done by people; clients and users are people; and under strict genetic testing most managers can be shown to share at least 50% of their genetic code with homo montipythonus.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

The media, the public relations people, the politicians, and advertisers who regulate much of the public flow of information have far more power than most people realize. They filter and channel information. Often they do so for short-term, self-interested purposes. It’s no wonder our that social systems so often run amok.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate culture. Everything tends to be weighed by its immediate impact on people. Meaning is drawn from that which is valued exclusively in human terms. The most important consequence is that we are left with very little to compare with the rest of life. The deficit shrinks the ground on which we can understand and judge ourselves.

— Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

…if a computer appears to be intelligent, that’s merely a reflection of the intelligence of the humans who programmed it. But what if humans’ intelligence is just a reflection of the billion-year evolutionary process that gave rise to it?

— Chris Bernhardt, Turing’s Vision