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

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.

There are any number of people who profess to be good Christian people who are willing to believe all kinds of things on suspicion. Now that is not the way the Bible directs for Christian people to do.

Those who enjoy their own emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse to do likewise, and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate them.

Getting talked about is one of the penalties for being pretty, while being above suspicion is about the only compensation for being homely.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

So my own suspicion is that the attorney has stopped this prosecution because part of her defence was to question legality and that would have brought his advice into the public domain again and there was something fishy about the way in which he said war was legal.

Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Suspicion is a heavy armor and with its weight it impedes more than it protects.

A defence in the Inquisition is of little use to the prisoner, for a suspicion only is deemed sufficient cause of condemnation, and the greater his wealth the greater his danger.

Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

I always regarded people who want fame with a lot of suspicion. Unless you have a product to sell, I don't know why anyone would want to be famous. I can't imagine what need that would fill.

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.