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

Models need to be judged by what they eliminate as much as by what they include—like stone carving, the art is in removing what you do not need.

— John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems

It is foolish to answer a question that you do not understand. It is sad to work for an end that you do not desire.

— G. Polya and John H. Conway, How to Solve It