I think these questions are just barely on-topic, and are definitely at the bottom end of the quality spectrum. My particular issue with them is that they don't explain what's wrong or what the problem is.
Consider on Stack Overflow when someone pastes a wall of code and says, "This isn't working. Can someone tell me what's wrong?" Everyone's first comment, provided the question isn't immediately closed as "not a real question", is "What have you tried? What specifically is giving you trouble?"
Pasting a quotation and saying "What does this mean?" is the same thing. What, specifically, about the quotation is indecipherable? What have you found so far about the subject? What are you looking to get out of knowing the answer to the question? Give us something to work with.
There is some value in knowing what popular quotations about software development mean: programmers like to invoke them as shibboleths in documentation and discussions. But without some context, these questions leave the door wide open to arm-chair philosophizing about what the author could've meant.