I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

…experts are more interested in what they did wrong—so they can fix it—than what they did right.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

The people who set the schedule, not just the ones who failed to meet it, need to be held accountable.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Apple is quoted as saying, “We’re at Level I [on the Capability Maturity Model] and will always be.”

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

If you hop on board a train going almost this fast and fire a gun out the window, the fundamental units of length change around, so it looks to you like the bullet is speeding ahead of you, but other people see something different.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind