…a talk Dijkstra gave at a conference in 1984: “The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

— Chris Bernhardt, Turing’s Vision

Anything, anything at all can be logical. For something to be logical, it just has to be a valid example of reasoning from some set of premises.

— Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Good Math

If all the world’s economists were stretched end to end—so goes a one-liner usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw—they still would not reach a conclusion.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Max Planck explained it like this in his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” or, more succinctly, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

Programmers think that design and performance are correlated, such that better design runs faster. In reality, they are frequently inversely correlated: simpler, more elegant designs run slower, and you improve performance by complicating your design with special cases.

— Adam Barr, TheProblem with Software