University Of Oxford Alumni

"Women wear the breeches."

"Penny wise, pound foolish."

"Rob Peter, and pay Paul."

"Him that makes shoes go barefoot himself."

"Smile with an intent to do mischief, or cozen him whom he salutes."

"Like the watermen that row one way and look another."

"As that great captain, Ziska, would have a drum made of his skin when he was dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his enemies to flight."

"I had not time to lick it into form, as a bear doth her young ones."

"It is most true, stylus virum arguit,—our style bewrays us."

"Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses."

"I say with Didacus Stella, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."

"We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer... Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best."

"They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works."

"I would help others, out of a fellow-feeling."

"I had a heavy heart and an ugly head, a kind of impostume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of."

"The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, all the world else is blinde."

"All my joys to this are folly Naught so sweet as melancholy."

"I caught glimpses of white-clad figures striding purposefully to and fro, heard men's voices calling each other in tones of authority and urgency, as if life had suddenly become more serious, as if battle were in prospect."

""I might go for a walk." Even to me this sounded a pedestrian thing to do."

""But men still shoot each other, don't they?" I asked hopefully."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"I remember walking to the cricket ground with the team, sometimes trying to feel, and sometimes trying not to feel, that I was one of them; and the conviction I had, which comes so quickly to a boy, that nothing in the world mattered except that we should win."

"William Beveridge, architect of the modern welfare state, understood the danger that people might settle down to life on benefits, so proposed compulsory re-training schemes. And realising the even greater risks for school-leavers, who were not used to earning a wage, his report argued that "for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all"."

"Beveridge loved parties and recreation as much as he loved work and conversation. He gave much hospitality in The Lodgings, and there was always gusto and gaiety and some challenge. I saw a lot of him after his retirement in 1954. I had come to love the now benign Beveridge. He retained a sort of boyishness and excitement, and his charm and tact could be consummate."

"Full Employment in a Free Society is really a sermonising tract, gloriously sweeping over difficulties human and technological to the promised land beyond. And, in the last resort, Sir William justified the practicality of his vision by simple analogy with the achievements of the wartime British economy: "The significance of war in relation to employment is that the scope of State outlay is increased immensely and indefinitely and that the State formally and openly gives up any attempt to balance its budget or limit its outlay by considerations of money". Similarly with regard to his plan for a welfare state, we are told by his daughter and biographer: "To the critics who inquired 'Can we pay for it?' the impatient reply was given, 'We can always pay for wars, this one costs £15 million a day. We will just have to afford the Beveridge Plan'.""

"[I]n his report on Full Employment in 1944 Beveridge urged an unquantified outlay of government funds in order to stimulate enough demand to bring about full employment, while admitting that such a policy in 1938 would have caused a balance-of-payments deficit of £130 million... Beveridge's answer to the conundrum lay in re-equipping industry and expanding output and exports, yet he offered no detailed analysis, no pondered advice, as to how these desirable objects were to be achieved; no costings of the investment needed and how it was to be funded; and he certainly failed to consider what effect the burden of the welfare state and the cost of maintaining full employment might have on such industrial investment. In any case he placed the need to modernise British industry and raise its productivity only third in priority in his "chosen route of planned national outlay"."

"It was the Beveridge Report that provided the battlefield on which the decisive struggle to win a national commitment to New Jerusalem was waged and won... As appropriate for a prophet and a brilliant Oxford intellect, Beveridge thought a lot of himself, so that righteousness went hand in hand with authoritarian arrogance and skill at manipulating the press to make him the Field Marshal Montgomery of social welfare."

"The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man."

"Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family."

"Organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness."

"Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching."

"The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else."

"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens."

"Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege."

"The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership 'til they have lost the desire to lead anyone."

"On my experience of his later years at least, while he was the greatest administrative genius I have seen he was almost certainly the worst administrator. He could not get on with his fellow administrators... He did not really understand politics, still less politicians, and in his tidy, administrative mind there was not always enough place for human reactions and human frailties... He was a hard master, but he certainly taught one of his research assistants the meaning of work, and the need for a thorough attack on the facts before one jumped into any theories about a subject."

"The new liberals...wanted an "unservile state" which took on only those welfare functions which would liberate the citizenry into citizenship. Lord Beveridge was a fine example of the breed, imbued with what Mrs Thatcher might hail as Victorian values, particularly a strong sense of social responsibility and a tremendous emphasis on the relationship between freedom, knowledge and self-control."

"He understood that his plan would be immeasurably strengthened by broad public support. So he shaped his proposals around the principle that "benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire". Everyone would put something in, and everyone would get something out. Beveridge appealed both to altruism and self-interest. This is often described as a welfare "contract" or "bargain". But that would be to misunderstand why the welfare state used to be so popular. As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas argues, it was popular because it represented an emotional connection, a way of thinking about the type of society that Britain was after the war — a covenant between each to look after all."

"William Beveridge reads today like an Old Testament prophet: full of moral declamation and visionary objective. His 1942 report set goals to attack the five giant evils: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The ecstatic reception of his report (or at least the abridged version) was the response of a society in the midst of an existential war, still traumatised by the scourge of unemployment in the previous decade."

"The army causes taxes, the taxes cause discontents, & the discontents are alleged to make an army necessary. Thus you go in a circle."

"Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program."

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

"One fine morning, when the emperor felt hot and bored, he extricated himself carefully from under the mountain of clothes and is now living happily as a swineherd in another story. The tailor is canonized as the patron saint of all consultants, because in spite of the enormous fees he extracted, he was never able to convince his clients of his dawning realization that their clothes have no Emperor."

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."

"I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article. [...] [Failures] are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time."

"[About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. [...] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use."

"[About Pascal] That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations."

"[About PL/I] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."

"[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure.""

"[About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait."