…what “industry best practice” actually gets you is not the best, but merely the average.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode?

— Becoming a Technical Leader, Gerald Weinberg

Time and again in the history of mathematics, paradoxes have arisen because fundamental notions were not divorced from their origins in the physical world.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory

…what is real freedom to Hegel? “It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” … The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests. … “this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.” … “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

While I see her unusual talent for critical introspection, I think her talent is more easily overlooked than the mathematical creativity and intuition exhibited by some of our majors. She has these talents too, but humility and an ability to recognize what you don’t know can silence these talents in the group setting.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing