Edsger Dijkstra, from an oral history interview with Philip Frana in 2001:
One of the most devious things we do is existing in time and the use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible, at least very difficult to argue about programs independently of their possibility of being executed.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, OH 330. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 2 August 2001, Austin, Texas. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://purl.umn.edu/107247. P. 16 of PDF.
