If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called 'life', expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

Mathematicians are like managers they want improvement without change.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent.

Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with environment.

The only greatness for man is immortality.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I believe in the immortality of all creatures.

The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever.

Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

The belief in immortality has always seemed cowardly to me. When very young I learned that all things die, and all that we wish of good must be won on this earth or not at all.

Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality.

If you are an antichrist, you won't believe in the bible prophecy from the beginning. Which means, you won't believe that physical immortality will become possible.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.