“Naive you are
if you believe
life favours those
who aren't naive.”
Naive —
Grooks
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Piet Hein 37
Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet 1905–1996Related quotes

1990s, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)
Context: Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

I feel the same about Unix.
"Ken Thompson clarifies matters", 1999

Refering to his conclusion to the Barber paradox or Russell's paradox.
Dijkstra (1985) Where is Russell's paradox? http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD923a.html (EWD 923A).
1980s

Weggefährten - Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, Siedler-Verlag Berlin 1996, S. 54, ISBN 9783442755158, ISBN 978-3442755158