Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

You can, you will. You did.

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

In your thinking be a goal setter, but in your actions be a goal getter.

Until a teacher learns to use elements like time, space, materials, groupings, and so forth flexibly, it's incredibly difficult to teach students as they need to be taught.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.

People have learned to escape Reality very well but too often lose their way back.

I focus on darker things or bad behavior or explicit dialogue because creatively I am more interested in my mistakes and why I made them than my good deeds and my achievements.

In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out.

If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks, Making us pry into ourselves so, near, Teach us to know ourselves, beyond all books, Or all the learned schools that ever were.

It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.