“UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.”

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Context: Simplicity and Dignity are so nearly related that they may be considered together.... A quiet air of reserved power is characteristic of dignity, and that is best obtained by simple means and the absence of apparent effort. Simplicity is the mark of genius. The giant in art does his work easily, without straining and without affectation; his ways are direct and to the point.

"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: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 11

Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967

On the design of the Apple Cinema Display http://www.apple.com/displays/, in an article by Leander Kahney in Wired News magazine (June 2003)

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 90