“Arrogance complicates words, because it believes that intelligence is only for the chosen few. Elegance transforms complex thoughts into something that everyone can understand.”

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Context: The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.

Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.
Totemism (1962), [Le Totémisme aujourd'hui, as translated by Rodney Needham], p. 89
Often paraphrased as "Animals are good to think with".

Picasso (1938)

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Series 1 Episode 6: "Religion"

Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.

Source: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2004), Ch. 5 : Heraclitus

2000s