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"You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all." -Sherlock Holmes
"It is my weakness, it has always been my weakness, to desire to show off." -Hercule Poirot
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
"Nero Wolfe is investigating the murder [...] with his accustomed vigor, skill, and laziness. He will not rest until he gets the bastard or until bedtime, whichever comes first" -Archie Goodwin
"Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him - possibly in his brain, though I doubt it - a powerful and subtle governor" -Nero Wolfe
"My enemy's enemy is a problem for later. In the meantime, they might be useful" -Inquisitor Quixos
"I do not pretend to be a good man. I doubt if the pretence would be of any use were I to try: I am not a sufficiently good actor." -Jerome K Jerome, "The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow"
"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing" -W. Edwards Deming (attr)
"I wake up each morning determined to change the World ... and also have one hell of a good time. Sometimes that makes planning the day a little difficult." -E.B. White "A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea." -Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughing and Forgetting "A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him." -Douglas MacArthur "It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall" -Napoleon, Military Maxims And Thoughts "The project leader who cares about his people will not try to sell them a bill of goods about the project. He will be honest about the level of effort it will require and its chances of success. Programmers aren't stupid. The experienced ones will have a keenly developed to tell them when they're being "fed a line." Most of them won't be a party to project games because they know they are the ones who will shoulder the burden when the crunch comes." -Edward Yourdon, Death March "Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. -Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution "The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue." -Emma Goldman, Anarchism And Other Essays "To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place,' because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room - is useful in gauging what you should try to do." -William Safire, Before The Fall