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Quotes by Dutch Authors
"It is not the least anxiety that we have so little powder and lead on hand."
"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges."
"It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance."
"By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade."
"Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion."
"The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others."
"Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism."
"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
"What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?"
"Because people have read those things in the newspapers, they think it is true. Ten years ago all these things I have just mentioned would have upset me."
"The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
"The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war."
"When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward."
"Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding."
"Happiness is a virtue, not its reward."
"Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning."
"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand."
"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."
"Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons."
"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
"When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith."
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
"But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things."
"A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie."
"Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders."
"The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation."
"People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming."
"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason."
"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."
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!"
"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity."
"We pray that the deceitful race - such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ - be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony."
"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."
"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."
"If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls."
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