You need to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants to compete in this Fourth Industrial Revolution.

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud

There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Happiness is relative. And the person hovering over the gaping maw of death will often feel the same elation from briefly escaping his miserable fate, as the free and healthy person will from his greatest accomplishment.

— Roman Gelperin, On Rotting Prison Straw

What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying . . . and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

modern software is inherently complex, and no matter how hard you try, you’ll eventually bump into some level of complexity that’s inherent in the real-world problem itself. This suggests a two-prong approach to managing complexity: Minimize the amount of essential complexity that anyone’s brain has to deal with at any one time. Keep accidental complexity from needlessly proliferating. Once you understand that all other technical goals in software are secondary to managing complexity, many design considerations become straightforward.

— Steve McConnell, Code Complete