You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle
is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
-- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Circle"
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as
easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered.
I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life
from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
"I think you're begging the question," said Haydock, "and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black hats and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that, you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!"
-- Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1962.