Niklaus Wirth Quotes

Thus with most careful devotion Thus with precise attention To detail, interfering preparation Of that which is already prepared Men lighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding, Reflecting a pocket-torch of observation.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

Don't express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not.

Being obscure in acronyms is great. I think I'll start making up my own... INYM - I'm Not Your Momma.

We're all shipwrecked on this idea that everything has to be explained.

Ambiguity — the Devil's volleyball.

Certainty is missing the point entirely.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

There are “well-known secrets” out there and there are people who are “so happy they could die.” Sometimes people are so sad they have to laugh and sometimes things feel so wrong, they’re right. Basically what I’m saying is, I usually don’t know what people are talking about.

Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace.

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.

The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself - a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.