“Baseball men, living from day to day in the clutch of carefully metered chance occurrences, have developed an entire bestiary of imagined causes to tie together and thus make sense of patterns that are in truth entirely accidental,” James wrote. “They have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings. It includes ‘momentum,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘seeing the ball well,’ ‘slumps,’ ‘guts,’ ‘clutch ability,’ being ‘hot’ and ‘cold,’ ‘not being aggressive’ and my all time favorite the ‘intangibles.’ By such concepts, the baseball man gains a feeling of control over a universe that swings him up and down and tosses him from side to side like a yoyo in a high wind.” It wasn’t just baseball he was writing about, James continued. “I think that the randomness of fate applies to all of us as much as baseball men, though it might be exacerbated by the orderliness of their successes and failures.”

"Failure does not strike like a bolt from the blue; it develops gradually according to its own logic." -- Dietrich Dorner

Little things can make a big difference, but only after the big things have been taken care of.
    -- Ward Cunningham

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don’t improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don’t buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don’t test more; develop better.
    -- Steve C. McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, 1993

(Thanks to Jean McAuliffe)

QA usually means testing and only testing. Yet testing is a very expensive and ineffective method of assuring the needed quality levels. Testing is better used as a last resort, desperate attempt to assure quality. -- Tom Gilb

"A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights."
--Napoleon Bonaparte

The difference between a charlatan and a quack is that a charlatan knows they're faking it.
  -- Michael Bolton

The most important thing in this world is the destruction of superstition. Superstition interferes with the happiness of mankind. Superstition is a terrible serpent, reaching in frightful coils from heaven to earth and thrusting its poisoned fangs into the hearts of men.  - Col. Robert Ingersoll

Did you ever notice how it's 'a penny for your thoughts,' but you put in 'your two cents worth'? Somebody is making money on this deal!
-- Steven Wright

“In 1776 the fight was for Democracy in Taxation. In 1936 there is still the fight. Mister Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said ‘taxes are the prices we pay for civilized society’. One sure way to determine the social conscience of a government is to examine the way taxes are collected and how they are spent. And one sure way to determine the social conscience of an individual is to get his tax reaction. Taxes, after all are the dues we pay for the privilege of membership in an organized society. And as society becomes more civilized government, national and state and local, is called on to assume more obligations to its citizens. The privileges of membership in a civilized society are vastly increased in modern times. But I am afraid we still have many who still do not recognize their advantages and want to avoid paying their dues.” -- President Roosevelt

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

--George Bernard Shaw

"Little’s Law as it relates to software – given the same amount of resource, the longer your projects are and the more of them you have, the greater your WIP (and therefore delays and therefore the work you have to do)." -- Alan Shalloway