…self-organization is such a basic property of living systems that even the most overbearing power structure can never fully kill it, although in the name of law and order, self-organization can be suppressed for long, barren, cruel, boring periods.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

‘The rhetoric of autonomy and transport is all about not changing the world,’ Stilgoe tells me. ‘It’s about keeping the world as it is but making and allowing a robot to just be as good as and then better than a human at navigating it. And I think that’s stupid.’ … ‘Things that look like autonomous systems are actually systems in which the world is constrained to make them look autonomous.’

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

It is curious that while wrestling with the continuum hypothesis both Cantor and Gödel experienced serious mental health problems.

— Richard Tiezen, Simply Gödel

Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

Now, in the face of that ignorance and ambiguity, we seem to have two schools of thought. On the one hand, we have those who proclaim each new idea that comes along as the solution to software productivity. First it was structured methods, then it was 4GLs, then it was CASE tools, and next it was object orientation. These people, I would assert, are the level one thinkers. Some perceive them as strong, because they see a solution clearly and move swiftly toward it. Others see them as simplistic, for they ignore the complexity in the problem and seem unable to accept the ambiguity.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity