Quotes

Short quotes useful for a portfolio footer, /quotes page, or talk slides. All are widely attributed; verify before treating as exact wording for print.

Engineering & systems

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
— Donald Knuth

“You cannot understand a system without perturbing it.”
— Often cited in control / systems thinking (various forms)

“The only way to go fast is to go well.”
— Robert C. Martin (paraphrased from Clean Architecture talks)

“Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.”
— Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month)

Reliability & operations

“Hope is not a strategy.”
— Common in SRE / resilience culture

“Everything fails all the time.”
— Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), on building for failure

Learning & craft

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
— Often attributed to Thomas Edison

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
— Alan Turing

Personal (add your own)

“A line from a mentor, friend, or book that orients your career.”
— Attribution