“What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.”

15 July 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/2645749878
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

[199801151818.KAA14538@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Source: One Hundred Demons

Variant: Look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they really are.
Source: Mockingjay

Arie de Geus, in: " Arie de Geus: The Thought Leader http://www.strategy-business.com/article/17421?gko=cedb2," in: Strategy & Business. April 1, 2001, Nr 22-25. p. 26

(I.3) Del Rey, p. 75
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)
Context: "I respect what is repectable," Tan'elkoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering. And what is repectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism--its goal--is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity."

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999
Context: Unix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itself—you could type "go" and in a few minutes it would recompile itself. You had total control over the whole system. So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view. Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.

Source: " The Poet of Pessimism https://www.henrysalt.co.uk/library/essay/the-poet-of-pessimism/", Vegetarian Review, August 1896
Context: We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance—it rests for other minds and other hands than our—but we can at least be assured that we have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take.

Interview with Time magazine (12 November 1973)
Other speeches and writings