Significant technological advances had come from a similar arrangement between universities and government during World War II: radar, nuclear weapons, and large calculating machines resulted from what Killian called “the freewheeling methods of outstanding academic scientists and engineers who had always been free of any inhibiting regimentation and organization.”

— Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

By its very nature, a product process aims at predictability: a product roughly defined by business needs before any great designer has spent substantial time on the problem, to be delivered at a stated time at a stated price. Predictability and great design are not friends.

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

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean

— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Software development has a long tradition of people so busy thinking about software development they don’t have time to develop software.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained