Comment by branko_d

I think this part of the Knuth's quote is central:

> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.

And he is explicitly advocating for optimizing the critical part:

> Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

And somehow, people have latched onto the catchphrase about "early optimization" that was taken out of context.