…public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…if you include the very people who will be affected in your decision-making process, change management becomes unimportant.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It is no disgrace for one striving for first place to stop at second or third. Among poets… there is room not only for Homer. And in philosophy, I am sure, the magnificence of Plato did not deter Aristotle of writing, and nor did the later, with all his breadth of knowledge, put an end to the studies of others.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

Some of those people are vendors selling reuse-in-the-large support products. Others are academics who understand very little about application domains and want to believe that domain-specific approaches aren’t necessary. There is a philosophical connection between these latter people and the one-size-fits-all tools and methodologists. They would like to believe that the construction of software is the same no matter what domain is being addressed. And they are wrong.

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