…human brain is but a finite machine, therefore there are only finitely many propositions which you believe. Let us label these propositions p1, p2, …, pn, where n is the number of propositions you believe. So you believe each of these propositions p1, p2, …, pn. Yet, unless you are conceited, you know that you sometimes make mistakes, hence not everything you believe is true. Therefore, if you are not conceited, you know that at least one of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn is false. Yet you believe each of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn. This is straight inconsistency.

— Raymond M. Smullyan, What Is the Name of This Book?

Software development is more valuable when it earns money sooner and spends money later. Incremental design explicitly defers design investment until the last responsible moment in an effort to spend money later.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

I think Thompson and Ritchie did the world a disservice by not defining the pretty-print presentation for C. Saying, “This is how we do it, but you can do it some other way,” has had a huge toll on humanity, and it will probably continue to always have one.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

While some on the far right might want to halt progress or even consider it to have gone too far already, and some on the far left consider progress a myth and insist that life in liberal democracies is still as oppressive as it ever has been (thanks, Foucault), liberalism both appreciates progress and is optimistic that it will continue.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories