It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.

— Stephen Fry

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Law of physics of software. You have schedule, quality and features. You can only pick 2 of those 3. You may not pick all 3.

-- Brian Cantrill

If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copy or a better computer, so what?

When you have a monopoly market share the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people and they end up running the companies and the product people get driven out of decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product and they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to help the customers.

-- Steve Jobs (cf. https://www.cringely.com/2012/04/not-your-fathers-IBM

People get out of balance when they see their value as being able to respond quickly. If I see myself as a machine for answering email, then my work life would never stop because my email never stops.

If instead I see my value as separating the important from the unimportant and making good decisions on the important, then I can go home at a reasonable hour, spend time with my family, ignore my email and phone messages all weekend long, and make sure that when I return to work, I am in the right mood to make the good decisions.

-- Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.

-- Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, 1957