…we can now be sure that the egg came first. This is because reproductive mutations separating a new species from its progenitor generally occur in reproductive rather than somatic DNA and are thus expressed in differences between successive generations, but not in the parent organisms themselves.

— Christopher Michael Langan and Chris Langan, The Art of Knowing

It borders on the impossible to write a program of any real complexity in C and not have a security problem.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

In examining the tasks of software development versus software maintenance, most of the tasks are the same—except for the additional maintenance task of “understanding the existing product.” This task consumes roughly 30 percent of the total maintenance time and is the dominant maintenance activity. Thus it is possible to claim that maintenance is a more difficult task than development.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Mathematics and logic were celebrated as the feature that distinguished humans from beasts—and now machines could do both.

— Peter J. Denning and Matti Tedre, Computational Thinking

Diversification doesn’t work as a strategy for the poor.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems