An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

You have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, and Ian Spence e Svante Lidman , The Essence of Software Engineering

Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it. But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind