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“Talent alone isn’t enough,” said Marcus. “You must adhere to good spell design practices. Even the most talented wizards can get careless and sloppy.”
― Jeremy Kubica, Best Practices of Spell Design

“If not in San Francisco, then where? Not Madison, Wisconsin, again, please, dear God.”
― Daniel Suarez, Daemon

“Look, let’s not turn this into a blamestorming session. There’ll be plenty of time for that if we fail.”
― Daniel Suarez, Daemon

“His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized decision rights, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of organizational capital to get the most from the technology. This, in turn, required radically different and, generally, higher skill levels in the workforce.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“In fact, the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has increased from 70 in 1990 to 300 in 2005, and much of this growth is linked to the greater use of IT,”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Ford CEO Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther are jointly touring a modern auto plant. Ford jokingly jabs at Reuther: “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay UAW dues?” Not missing a beat, Reuther responds: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“But the broader lesson of the first Industrial Revolution is more like the Indy 500 than John Henry: economic progress comes from constant innovation in which people race with machines. Human and machine collaborate together in a race to produce more, to capture markets, and to beat other teams of humans and machines.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“When significant numbers of people see their standards of living fall despite an ever-growing economic pie, it threatens the social contract of the economy and even the social fabric of society.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine

“Building and maintaining consensus while collaborating is the hardest part of building software.”
― Russell Jurney, Agile Data Science: Building Data Analytics Applications with Hadoop

“You’re bigger than the toys. We are always bigger than the things we make. Put them away. Make something new with your life, with your own mind and hands.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief

“The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers—Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship

“I understood Mark’s coldness: This company was his baby, and he had always been in control of it and, while we worked there, of us. It must be strange to see your dependents—people whose careers you have made possible, even as their long hours of work have helped your company prosper—asserting independence.”
― Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network

“Message reads: 'Houston, be advised: Rich Purnell is a steely-eyed missile man.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“It is critical not only which book you read, but equally so, which book you choose NOT to read. Every time you read the right book, it puts you a little bit ahead of the game.”
― Vu Tran, Effortless Reading: The Simple Way to Read and Guarantee Remarkable Results

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five