This line comes from Tony Hoare’s 1980 Turing Award lecture, The Emperor’s Old Clothes. In it, he reflects on the systems he had worked on and argues that reliability cannot be bought with money or effort alone, but only earned through simplicity.

The surrounding passage makes the point sharply. Hoare observes that almost any software can be built and sold given enough determination and funding, but that reliability resists such force. It comes instead from stripping a design back to its essentials, so that fewer things can go wrong and the whole can be understood.

He adds that this is a price the very rich find hardest to pay, since abundant resources tempt designers towards elaboration rather than restraint. The remark has become a widely cited principle in software engineering, valued well beyond the context in which Hoare first offered it.

Full quotation

“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.”