“… talk should precede, not follow, the issuance of orders.”

— Dean Acheson , book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

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Dean Acheson 49

Statesman and lawyer 1893–1971

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“We must follow the old authorities and precedents in criminal matters.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Queen v. Sowerby (1894), L. R. 2 Q. B. D. [1894], p. 175.

“In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

That Everything is to be undertaken with Circumspection, Chap. xv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both eyes, is easier than to think.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 3, “Pseudoscience” (p. 67; quoting William Cowper)

“tt>/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */</tt”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

toke.c
Source code, Other files

“Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"
Context: Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments.