The trick in life (and risk management) is to have as much respect for experience before one acquires said experience as one would after.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

…anything real enough to quantify reality from the outside is already included in reality and therefore on the inside! Since this is a logical contradiction, the idea that reality can be externally evaluated is logically invalid.

— Christopher Michael Langan, The Art of Knowing

The manager’s function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month

“There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”

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

Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters