“I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter.”
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text
Context: I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Ward Cunningham 69
American computer programmer who developed the first wiki 1949Related quotes

CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer and James Mattis on July 20, 2013, in an interview conducted live on CNN about Mattis, his experiences as a senior commander in the Marine Corps, and his perspectives on modern issues of defense.

“After you get stung, you can't get unstung
no matter how much you whine about it.”
Source: The Secret Life of Bees

An elite soldier on using drones to hunt terrorists — and giving the kill order http://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/17/15961420/drone-terrorist-iraq-afghanistan-interview-warrior-brett-velicovich, Vox, 17 July 2017

Attributed
“No matter how much you hate or how much you suffer, you can't bring the dead back to life”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib8YG-WDZtM: 6 minutes 08 seconds into the video

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
Variant in Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements" http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf. Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1.
Knuth refers to this as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of Tex", Software—Practice & Experience 19:7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685. However, the attribution to C. A. R. Hoare is doubtful. http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
All three of these papers are reprinted in Knuth, Literate Programming, 1992, Center for the Study of Language and Information ISBN 0937073806
Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 671