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"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."
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"Trying to educate the dumb with a dumb teacher is nothing but washing the dirty clothes in a dirty water!"

"Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'"

"Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it."

"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever."

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education."

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

"Sex education has to do with what's in people's head."
Explore more quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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