Donald E. Knuth: "Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do."

Barry Boehm: "Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowledge down in plans."

Brian Kernigan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

Martin Fowler: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." (from Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 0201485672)

Frederick P. Brooks: "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas: "Some things are better done than described....Here's a challenge for you. Write a short description that tells someone how to tie bows in their shoelaces. Go on, try it!" (from The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, 020161622X)

Dave Barry: "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings."

Ted Husted (Struts committer): "Life is too short to use application frameworks that aren't being written by writing applications."

Ron Jeffries: "Improvement stops when we start believing that ideas about how to improve are insulting."

C. A. R. Hoare: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

C.A.R. Hoare, in The Emperor's Old Clothes, (Turing Award Lecture 27 October 1980): "At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way---and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."

Jerry Weinberg: "Look to the past only for understanding."

Jing Fa: "If names and real items do not correspond with each other, there will be fighting."

Phlip: "An old, beautiful Utne Reader article divides all actions into 4 categories: Win/Win, Theft, Altruism, and Stupidity. Theft is where you gain and someone else loses. Altruism is the reverse, and Stupidity is where both sides lose."

John Maxwell: "The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one."

Dale Emery: "Integrity and courage are contagious. But they can have a long incubation period."

Phlip: "You can't use logic to talk someone out of a position they did not enter using logic."

T.H. White, The Once and Future King: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Larry Constantine: "Abstraction is a means to ends, a basic tool of software engineering that we use to distill the essence of user needs toward writing less software to deliver the same capability."

Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Dee Hock: "Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can rent the body and influence the mind but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and ethics."

C. A. R. Hoare: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Paul B. MacCready, designer of the Gossamer Condor: "Treat every problem as if it can be solved with ridiculous simplicity. The time you save on the 98% of problems for which this is true, will give you ridiculous resources to apply to the other 2%."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wind, Sand and Stars: Perfection is reached not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wind, Sand and Stars: If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Millard Fuller: It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

Euripides: Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

Herbert Spencer: "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

Somerset Maugham: "After four hours a day, the writer is kidding himself."

Ralph A. Mack: "Within any large project is a small project crying to be set free."

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love: "Never try and teach a pig to sing: it's a waste of time, and it annoys the pig."

Laurent Bossavit: "Treat people as ends not means. In business situations, however, this attitude is far from the norm. It is IMHO at the heart of what separates 'management' from 'leadership'."

Martin Fowler: "If you can not change your organisation, then change your organisation."

Eisenhower: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

Eric Hodges: "It pisses off some people when you suggest that life emerged without conscious comprehension of its overall structure. We seem to get upset and scared when we don't feel like *someone* is driving."

Soviet Army saying: "Don't rush to implement your commander's orders. Wait until he changes his mind."

Donald Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Francis Bacon: "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

Heraclitus (circa 540-480 BC): "On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow." or "You cannot step into the same river twice."

Eric Hodges: "I just don't want to jeopardize my confidence that I've fixed a bug. There's a Zen saying, "You can never step in the same river twice." The meaning is that the river and the person are always changing. I don't need any Zen crap in my code. I want reproducible results."

Ronald E Jeffries: "As long as you always keep an open mind, that's what counts. That way you can be sure you don't hear things that aren't being said, and do hear what is being said. This third sentence suggests that the second sentence may be false and that the first sentence may offer a reason why."

In A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988), Stephen Hawking tells the story of an elderly woman who confronted Bertrand Russell at the end of a lecture on orbital mechanics, claiming she had a theory superior to his. "We don't live on a ball revolving around the Sun," she said, "we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle." Wishing to humor the woman Russell asked, "And what does this turtle stand on?" "On the back of a second, still larger turtle," was her confident answer. "But what holds up the second turtle?" he persisted, now in a slightly exasperated tone. "It's no use, young man," the old woman replied, "it's turtles all the way down."

Seneca, Epistolae, VII,7: Homines dum docent discunt. "Men learn while they teach."

Blaise Pascal: "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short."

Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC: "We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized ... I was to learn later in life that we meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

John Ciardi: "A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea."

Andrew S. Tanenbaum: "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."

Theodore H. White: "The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment."

Will Rogers: "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."

Ernest Hemingway: "Never mistake motion for action."

W. Somerset Maugham: "It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."

Mark Twain: "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

Pablo Picasso: "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

Richard Feynman: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."