Guido van Rossum

"Life is too short to be serious all the time. If you can't laugh at yourself, call me, I'll laugh at you."

"Python's design philosophy emphasizes code readability."

"I try to avoid encoding too much state in APIs."

"Readability counts."

"Beautiful is better than ugly."

"Explicit is better than implicit."

"Simple is better than complex."

"Complex is better than complicated."

"Flat is better than nested."

"Sparse is better than dense."

"Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

"Practicality beats purity."

"Errors should never pass silently."

"Unless explicitly silenced."

"In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess."

"There should be one way to do it, preferably only one way."

"Now is better than never."

"Although never is often better than right now."

"If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea."

"If the implementation is easy to explain, you may have a good idea."

"Namespaces are one honking great idea, let's do more of those."

"The best way to learn is by doing."

"Code is poetry written for computers."

"I like to think of programming as a form of communication."

"The goal of Python was always to make programming accessible."

"I have never been able to understand why simplicity is not valued more."

"Good design is a matter of taste."

"I believe in the power of community."

"Open source is about sharing and collaboration."

"Testing is essential to good software development."