Everyone pointed out this quote, but as I noted in reply to zentara, that sentiment is actually very different from the gist of the quote I am after. The gist of this quote is that being able to keep multiple abstraction in mind is the talent that makes one a programmer. The quote I am looking for asserts that when faced with a problem while building a system, one can solve it either by remove abstractions or by introducing new ones. These statements have little more than incidental overlap in that they both involve abstractions.

Makeshifts last the longest.