Edsger Dijkstra Trying Quotations

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.