Quotes & Phrases
The following is a list of phrases and quotes that help us think about being more pliant in our software development. If you have any additions please let us know.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
– Albert Einstein
The doctor said I wouldn’t have so many nose bleeds if I kept my finger outta there.
– Ralph Wiggum
Neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
- Jared Diamond
Other people’s experience is a place to start, not a place to end.
There are no best practices. By this I mean there is no practice that is better than all other possible practices, regardless of the context.
Everything is questionable.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, fix it.
If the process you are following isn’t adding specific value to your software, then change your process.
Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
– Confucius
Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.
– Niccolo Machiavelli
If you are going to get better, you have to change.
It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.
– Publilius Syrus, First Century BC
Challenge the status-quo.
Excellence in an intellectual craft simply cannot be attained by ignorantly copying what other people say that they do.
The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.
– Robert P. Vanderpoel
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
– Francis Bacon, Essays, II, On Innovation
Can we do better?
– Ping Wang
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
– Abraham Lincoln
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.
– Nathaniel Branden
Go ahead and follow your favorite practices. Just don’t preach that the rest of us must follow them, too. Keep your process standards to yourself. If you want to make a suggestion, make one that takes context into account.
You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.
– Heraclitus ca. 500 BC
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
– Charles Kettering
It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly.
– Vincenzio Galilei
on October 10th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Closing comments on this page due to spam. Please email me if you have a phrase/quote to add.