Excerpt from a mock interview with Stroustrup:

"[...] Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. [...]"

A real quote from Stroustrup:

"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." (many would now add, "Yes, and it's called Java.")

A quote from Steve Taylor, 1998:

Definition of C++: "An octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog".