A characteristic of insecure people is that they try to make others feel inferior either by talking way above their level or by being condescending. The job of a secure person is to figure out how to speak to others at their level of understanding.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

…there is more to kindness and morality than empathy. To think otherwise is either to define empathy so broadly as to gut it of all content or to have a parched and unimaginative view of the moral psyche.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

Organizations that refuse to take responsibility for the situations in which they put their own employees struggle to achieve operational excellence.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

How cruel that they punished you for something you cannot change. We love you no matter what. Both imply that there is, in fact, something wrong with the person in question.

— Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language

My aim is not small, simple code, but rather code that I can change when I learn new things.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering