Top 15 Gerald Weinberg Quotes

The power of the Ten Commandments is magnified if you remember the Helpful Model: No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.

If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.

A controller that cannot control itself is worse than no controller at all: If you cannot manage yourself, you have no business managing others.

Quality is value to some person

Things are the way they are because they got that way

The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.

The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language."

Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things.

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.

We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.