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

Expectations create reality, or at least color it. If you expect the worst from people, technology, or an organization, then that’s what you’re primed to see.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning