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Quotes by Dutch Authors

"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?"

"It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors."


"But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things."

"Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism."

"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."

"By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade."

"In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages."


"One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion."

"In the absence of a magnetic field the period of all these oscillations is the same. But as soon as the electron is exposed to the effect of a magnetic field, its motion changes."

"The attack did not succeed as well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg."

"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."


"Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again."

"When I make a book, I make it for the child and not for the parent - no jokes in it for the parents!"


"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."

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."

"Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad."

"I value the blood of one Christian more than that of a hundred Indians."

"I always liked serve-and-volley players and big athletes."

"It's never been important to be a huge star or to have some breakout role. If you're the lead, you get a lot more screen time and you get a lot more chances to develop that character more thoroughly than you would if you do it in a little supporting part."

"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."

"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."

"It is my intention to proceed slowly with our trenches."

"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."

"Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment."


"The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid."

"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."

"It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces."

"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."

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."


"To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life."

"Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change."

"Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature."

"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity."


"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."

"Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly."

"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."

"Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human."

"Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing."

"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."


"However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions."
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