I'm amused by the other three example aphorisms in your opening paragraph, because I knew the originators of those three off the top of my head.<p>In <i>The Mythical Man-Month</i>, Fred Brooks said “Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.”<p>Edsger Dijkstra sent a letter titled “A Case Against the Go To Statement” to the Communications of the ACM. The journal's editor, Niklaus Wirth, changed the title to “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”.<p>Donald Knuth said “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, but after a qualifier. I didn't remember where he said it though. It was in “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. The qualifier was “We <i>should</i> forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time”.