Niklaus Wirth Quotes

I have infinite capacity to do more work as long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero.

If you're a thorough professional, and they won't let you do a professional job, nobody's going to benefit from it. The people who produce it won't benefit. The people who buy it won't benefit from it. They're going to get a half-assed product.

When I first heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise. Something that people could understand, something that was beautiful.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

I have so much to grapple with, I don't think too much about me. People call it the "dance of a thousand egos" when you make a movie. If only I had time to worry when I was making a movie about what the hell I was doing. It's sort of a marathon every day. And then at the end of it, you beg the producers for five more marathons.

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product.

The translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them.

We still have the illusion that the ocean will recover. That even if we do have to lose sharks, people don't understand why this matters. The evidence is in front of us, and we fail to take it in and say, "Now I get it. Now I understand."

I think that in the end, the people are not fooled by promotion. They want to know that something works and is right.

Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.

In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better... They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.

I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.

I do like to work. Some jobs are better than others. That's the thing: You really don't know. I've enjoyed making movies for lots of different reasons. Sometimes, it was the other people. Sometimes, it was the fact that I was really good in it. Sometimes, it was the location. Sometimes, it was the paycheck.

I have so much music to release, but I'm meticulous. I'm like, "You've got to redo that part, redo that part." And people are like, "Just forget that and go ahead with it." But it's all about perfection, about trying to make it as good as you can.

Most people simply don't view going to meetings as doing work.

Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands." "No he has kind of amazing hands.

Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.

A company's employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product

"I'm going to put out something that I believe in, or I'm not going to do it." I'm really scared of putting out a product that people will say, "Oh, that's not as good as the other thing."

Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.