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Quotes by Dutch Authors

"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."

"Women, can't live with them, can't live without them."

"If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen."

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

"Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders."

"The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self."

"It's always an enormous pressure when you do a sequel. The demands are so high, and it's expensive."

"But, then again, I had to stop because there was too much pain or too much trouble. After I retired I still had one more elbow surgery just to be able to do normal things."

"It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city."

"According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined."

"I always feel like I want to do my career my own way. I never follow anybody's path, what they've done."

"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."

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

"He who allows oppression shares the crime."

"In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king."

"On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron."


"The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others."

"Speed is often confused with insight. When I start running earlier than the others, I appear faster."

"Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed."

"It is not the least anxiety that we have so little powder and lead on hand."

"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."


"My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated."

"If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls."

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

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture."

"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."

"The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death."

"Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin."

"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason."

"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."

"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?"
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