My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers.

Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer's standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.)

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.