The good news is that, as Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the noncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Never take for granted that the receiver has the same reality as you. Never take for granted that the receiver will interpret the message the way it was intended. Communication is not an absolute, finite thing. Always assume as many different realities exist as there are different people involved in the communication.

— Christopher Hadnagy and Paul Wilson, Social Engineering

Doctors troubleshoot the human body—they never got a chance to debug it. (It took God one day to design, prototype, and release that product; talk about schedule pressure! I guess we can forgive priority-two bugs like bunions and male pattern baldness.)

— David J. Agans, Debugging

By its very nature, a product process “fights the last war,” encouraging tactics that have worked in the past and discouraging those that have failed. Hence for the product addressing a new war—a totally new need or mode of operating—both kinds of tactics may be irrelevant.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Design of Design