Most can’t figure out why one can like rigorous knowledge and despise academics, yet they understand that one can like food and hate canned tuna.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Many senior developers build the same types of applications year after year, and become bored with the monotony. Most developers would rather write a framework than use a framework to create something useful: Meta-work is more interesting than work. Work is boring, mundane, and repetitive, whereas building new stuff is exciting.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architechtures

Any time freedom is allowed it will be abused. This is not a flaw in freedom (else police states might be more desirable) but a flaw in humanity.

— Zach Weinersmith, Polystate

When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Many significant advances in our understanding of the cosmos are by-products of government investment in the apparatus of warfare, and many innovative instruments of destruction are by-products of advances in astrophysics.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang, Accessory