"I understand what you are trying to ask and I think that you are wrong." -- or something so close to that as makes no difference. While the audience hooted, laughed and razzed.
Right then it became clear to me why the C++ community is so awful. It starts with Bjarne who is /not/ a nice guy. Every other language community I've dealt with, C, Perl, Python, Scheme is more pleasant than C++ with their annointed "smart people" who stand in their circle while failing to discourage everyone else who, well, acts exactly like Bjarne did above. And just to be clear, Bjarne gave a lecture in which he pointed out linked lists are awful on modern hardware. The question was, "Shouldn't the standard library make the right decision for you if one is always wrong?" Whatever you think of the question or the appropriate response Bjarne was just being nasty and enjoying it like a school bully.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson apparently had some experience of Bjarne he spoke about.
This is intellectual humility. He's obviously a genius in his own right.
I'm not sure this is true. You can get basic OO going on C in an afternoon with structs and function pointers. That is a very, very common technique in graphics programming (or was, before C++ optimizers got any good). ObjC is also a thing. The achievement of Stroustrup - and this is no minor thing, so don't think that I am discrediting him in any way - was he got everyone else to buy into his vision for a particular way of doing it.
Incidentally I recently attended a talk given by Stroustrup and he is a super nice guy and certainly doesn't think of himself as a genius.