The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

— Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Sometimes negotiations produce the absurd situation in which customers who have no idea how to build a software system nevertheless claim to know how long it will take to build it.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Garbage collection is a horrible hack that we have accepted into our languages because we are just so bad at managing temporal couplings. If we were adept at keeping track of allocated memory, we would not depend on some nasty background process to clean up after us. But the sad fact is we are so truly terrible at managing temporal couplings that we celebrate the crutches we build to protect ourselves from them.

— Robert C. Martin, Functional Design

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