You can tell who the real artists are not only by their prodigious output but also by their stack of failed experiments, their overflowing bookcases, and the way their eyes get all crazy when they talk about the minutia of their avocation.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

“A great truth,” Bohr liked to say, “is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

…the real purpose of society, which is not to create an ideal person, but to create a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as possible…

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Set the expectation that all systems need to be rewritten eventually. Engineers at the highest level write programs that have to be revised. No one is smart enough to anticipate every new use case or feature, every advancement in hardware, or every adjustment or shift that might require code to be rewritten.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire