Pretty sure you are correct. The "quote" was paraphrased from my poor memory. Also from what I read, the book series is, even today, very informative and relevant. I am however disappointed how much damage this quote is doing outside of a proper context.

"In practice, it is often necessary to keep performance goals in mind when first designing software, but the programmer balances the goals of design and optimization."

^^ This. I am ashamed when the original quote is being used to basically advocate "write un-optimized code and we'll buy hardware, which is cheaper than development time". I do realize that wasn't the case back when the books were written (hardware was hella expensive), but today this is just encouraging bad form in developers, many times their go-to reaction is "let's add more ram".

Yup.

Instead of discouraging the idea of writing unmaintainable code that is faster in an area that may not even be a bottleneck we get people who use that quote to excuse writing terrible code.

Good design is not premature optimization.

The quote actually goes back much earlier, to the days where writing a program meant writing machine code routines.

And it's also highly misunderstood, because it's used as a mantra, out of context.

Good development is not mantra-driven.