The generals and the captains of industry were quite right. There was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it. That is why all dictators, and would-be dictators… have mistrusted art

— Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as non-violence; to speak of non-violent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

— On Violence, Hannah Arendt

…ease of code use is often inversely proportional to how reusable that code is.

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

You should know by now that programming is the grunt work needed to implement solutions to problems. Defining the problems and their solutions is the interesting and harder part.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs