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Quotes by Dutch Authors
"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."
"My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated."
"Ambition is the immoderate desire for power."
"Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character."
"The attack did not succeed as well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg."
"The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war."
"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."
"There was a project at Lawrence Livermore National Labs where many years ago they went down this path for scripting and controlling very large numerical calculations."
"I value the blood of one Christian more than that of a hundred Indians."
"Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands."
"It's always an enormous pressure when you do a sequel. The demands are so high, and it's expensive."
"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."
"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 revolution in Russia was victorious with the help of the poor peasants. This should always be borne in mind here in Western Europe and all the world over. But the workers in Western Europe stand alone: this should never be forgotten in Russia."
"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."
"By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him."
"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason."
"In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king."
"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."
"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."
"Will and intellect are one and the same thing."
"Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change."
"Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either."
"When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated."
"Happiness is a virtue, not its reward."
"At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years."
"It is wisdom in prosperity, when all is as thou wouldn't have it, to fear and suspect the worst."
"It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces."
"If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls."
"Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance."
"Robert De Niro... It seemed like a pretty cool thing to do to put his name on my resume next."
"It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence."
"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems."
"The entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too, if I'm not mistaken, and I'll never lack priests to serve it as long as there are men."
"If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it."
"My own perception of that is somewhat colored by where people ask my advice, which is still, of course, about changes to Python internals or at least standard libraries."
"What difference does it make to you what someone else becomes, or says, or does? You do not need to answer for others, only for yourself."
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