You can’t automate excellence, though we will likely keep trying. It’s futile. Why? Because people are actually worth something.

— Dan Charnas, Everything in Its Place

…the 1966 Rosenthal-Jacobson study, in which students were given a fake aptitude test and their teachers were told which students were expected to “bloom” (when in reality the so-called good students were randomly selected). Over the next year, those students did better than their classmates.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

A good programmer should know a dozen or so languages.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

…research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A theorem is no more proved by logic and computation than a sonnet is written by grammar and rhetoric, or than a sonata is composed by harmony and counterpoint, or a picture painted by balance and perspective. Logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, harmony and counterpoint, balance and perspective, can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself. Thus the relation of logic to mathematics is seen to be that of an applied science to its pure ground, and all applied science is seen as drawing sustenance from a process of creation with which it can combine to give structure, but which it cannot appropriate.

— George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form