Why does mathematics underlie everything in life? How does it manage to link disconnected realms—coins and genes, dice and stocks, books and baseball? The reason is that mathematics is a system of thinking, and every problem in the world benefits from thinking.

— Ben Orlin, Math With Bad Drawings

The problem is that there aren’t just a handful of root causes of slow development, and in the end trying to identify the root causes of slow development isn’t very useful. It’s like asking, `What is the root cause of my not being able to run a 4-minute mile?’

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Software is complicated because it tries to model the irreducible complexity of the world.

— Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime

The primary controversy here is that too many people in the computing field think that reuse is a brand-new idea. As a result, there is enormous (and often hyped) enthusiasm for this concept, an enthusiasm that would be more realistic if people understood its history and its failure to grow over the years.

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