Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other.

— Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

What’s true is that the sensation of mathematical understanding—of suddenly knowing what’s going on, with total certainty, all the way to the bottom—is a special thing, attainable in few if any other places in life. You feel you’ve reached into the universe’s guts and put your hand on the wire. It’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

— Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong

Thus, I believe that overconfidence is one of the oldest and most dangerous forms of self-deception-both in our personal lives and in global decisions, such as going to war.

— Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools

Managers; academics; software engineers; computer scientists; and proponents of UML, RUP, and CMM all tend to be formalists. Practitioners, as Robert Glass has shown, generally are informalists. XP and object thinkers aspire to be aformalists.

— David West, Object Thinking

So much for inductivism. And since inductivism is false, empiricism must be as well. For if one cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations. Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity