Whenever a supervisor is responsible for work he does not understand, he begins to reward workers not for work, but for the appearance of work.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Phychology of Computer Programming

Have you heard about the dyslexic theologian who tried to prove that a dog exists?

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.”

— Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Effective Programming

In the various attempts to solve the problem of consistency there is one persistent source of difficulty. It lies in the fact that the axioms are interpreted by models composed of an infinite number of elements. This makes it impossible to encompass the models in a finite number of observations; hence the truth of the axioms themselves is subject to doubt.

— Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman and Douglas R. Hofstadter, Sapiens

The “goals” of natural selection transcend our bodies. So, strange as it might seem, selfish genes create altruistic animals, motivating kindness toward others

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy