"I wrote PHP as a hammer to do my stuff. Around 1993, the only way to write web apps was by hacking C and Perl. This was extremely painful, and you would have to do the same thing over and over again. So I started writing a tool which would make my work easier."
"I never thought while writing PHP that someday millions of people will be looking over my shoulder into my code. If I would have known that, I would have surely done a few things differently. But nobody knows that. Some appreciate the language, some don't. I don't blame them."
"PHP is a hammer. Use it for the right purpose at right place. Learn Python, Ruby, Haskell, Scala, etc. every language and use them where they fit. No language is perfect. There are trade-offs involved in each of them."
"When anything is too popular, criticism naturally follows. When people compare a language which is used in, say, 35% of the web apps to a language which is used in, say, 5%, their comparison is highly skewed because then they directly compare the number of things that have gone wrong in one with respect to another. They don't scale them to the same level and then see the faults. I don't blame anyone for that."
"You can scale horizontally with PHP as much as you want. There are many companies doing that, and they have been very successful."
"I can teach a semi-intelligent monkey to code in PHP in three hours."
There were many other cool and brilliant things he pointed out. What I learnt: Accept what it is. If you don't like it for your purpose, use another language which fits in.
P.S. In the new release of PHP, there are even driven servers (libevent), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Traits, Instance Method Call, built-in web server for testing, improved error messages, broad performance improvements, and many others. This language is not going to go away soon.