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58: Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

— Alan Perlis

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Intelligence

More quotes by Alan Perlis

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Computer science is neither mathematics nor electrical engineering.

A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alan Perlis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.