…the value of consistency over inconsistency is almost always greater than the value of one approach over another.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

Institutions, laws, restraints and moral discipline are a part of freedom and not its enemy, and liberation from such things rapidly brings freedom to an end.

— Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

In science, we cannot prove our theories correct; we can only observe them to be incorrect. We perform these observations with well-designed and well-controlled experiments. Likewise, in software, we almost never try to prove our programs correct. Instead, we detect their incorrectness by conducting observations in the form of well-designed tests.

— Robert C. Martin, We, Programmers

Gathering concrete data is the best way for developers to vet the approach; remember the adage that demonstration defeats discussion.

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

…many benefactors of mankind, who did not inherit power but seized it for themselves, ought to have been executed at their very first steps. But those men endured their steps, and therefore they were right…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment