A Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.

Edsger Dijkstra

Quote Topics

Being Black Box Convincing Correctness Demonstration Hope Impossible Lies Long Mechanism Only Our Regarded Regarding

Quote Author

Edsger Dijkstra
Dutch - Scientist
May 11, 1930 - August 6, 2002

Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.

Robert Gilpin

Normally Connor would walk away from a conversation like this. His life is about tangibles: things you can see, hear and touch. God, souls, and all that has always been like a secret in a black box he couldn't see into, so it was easier just to leave it alone. Only now, he's inside the black box.

Neal Shusterman

Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

Charles Yu

As for breaking up, once the relationship is over, you never really know what went wrong; you just feel nauseous whenever the subject comes to mind. After a plane crash there's the black box that tells the FAA what caused the crack-up. Too bad there's no black box of relationships.

Linda Sunshine

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.

Simone de Beauvoir

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

Stephen Carter

We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

Larry McDonald

Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique.

Monica Raymund

That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong.

Carl Sagan

We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.

Michael Behe

When you're a Black actress, the box that we often get put in is so small. And me being a dark-skinned Black actress, the opportunities become so limited in a way that is just wrong. It's not fair. I'm so capable of playing a wide variety of roles. It comes down to whether or not I'm given the opportunity to do it.

KiKi Layne

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine?

Mark S. Fowler

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

Sylvia Plath

Being black has been put in such a negative light. For such a long time, being black has been criminalized, but being black is something that I should be proud of because we have so many black people who have accomplished so many amazing things in the world.