If you want to advance the state of the art, by all means, do it. But don’t expect to do it rapidly!

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours (St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre) than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Leibniz’s 17th-century breakthroughs led to an 18th-century golden age of symbol pushing, which led to a 19th-century backlash obsessed with axiomatization and rigor, which led to 20th-century work on formal systems and computability, which led to the 21st-century laptop…

— Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

The smallest prime is 2—the only even prime number. The largest, as this book goes to press, is 2^2,976,221 − 1, an 895,932-digit number discovered by Gordon Spence in December 1997 on a home computer, using a program downloaded over the internet; if printed, it would fill a 450-page book.

— Eli Maor, E

…anyone who says that they’ve “solved CAP” is saying that they’ve defied the laws of physics and thus should not be trusted.

— Luc Perkins, Eric Redmond, and Jim Wilson, Seven Databases in Seven Weeks