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Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra Dijkstra (1984)

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More quotes by Edsger W. Dijkstra

A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures.

The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.

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

Dijkstra (1970)

The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.

Dijkstra (1988)

It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.

Dijkstra (2000)

All Edsger W. Dijkstra quotes →

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

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