The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach.

— Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak

No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life. Our system of justice should reflect our understanding that each of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

— Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

…the correlation between the esthetic and the pragmatic value of a program is not accidental—the more pleasing to the eye and mind, the more likely to be correct. Or, put more poetically, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

There were two amazing things about structured programming. The first was that it was hyped as being a breakthrough in our ability to build software, and it was accepted and used by almost all programmers in almost all practitioner organizations. The second is that no research was ever performed to demonstrate that the claimed and hyped value existed.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Bias is a slippery statistical notion, which may disappear if you slice the data a different way. Discrimination, as a causal concept, reflects reality and must remain stable.

— Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why