…anything real enough to quantify reality from the outside is already included in reality and therefore on the inside! Since this is a logical contradiction, the idea that reality can be externally evaluated is logically invalid.

— Christopher Michael Langan, The Art of Knowing

The manager’s function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month

“There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”

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

Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems