Top 100 Linus Quotes
#1. Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.
Linus Pauling
#2. No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.
Linus Torvalds
#4. Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.
Linus Pauling
#5. Do unto others 20% better than you'd expect them to do unto you to correct subjective error.
Linus Pauling
#6. An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.
Linus Torvalds
#7. I've been to India a lot, ever since when my mum was in 'Jewel In The Crown.'
Linus Roache
#8. There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.
Linus Pauling
#10. The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.
Linus Torvalds
#11. Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.
Linus Torvalds
#12. I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.
Linus Torvalds
#13. The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used-we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immmorality.
Linus Pauling
#15. Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.
Linus Torvalds
#17. When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.
Linus Roache
#18. Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
Linus Torvalds
#19. I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference.
Linus Torvalds
#20. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
Linus Torvalds
#21. People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.
Linus Torvalds
#22. Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.
Linus Torvalds
#23. With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.
Linus Torvalds
#24. In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
Neal Stephenson
#25. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
Linus Torvalds
#26. I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.
Linus Torvalds
#27. I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.
Linus Torvalds
#29. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
Linus Torvalds
#30. Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.
Peter Agre
#31. If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.
Linus Torvalds
#32. [Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.
Linus Pauling
#33. Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.
Linus Torvalds
#34. If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.
Linus Torvalds
#35. I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.
Linus Torvalds
#36. I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.
Linus Torvalds
#37. I think every person should be able to enjoy life. Try to decide what you most enjoy doing, and then look around to see if there is a job for which you could prepare yourself that would enable you to continue having this sort of joy.
Linus Pauling
#38. Every aspect of the world today - even politics and international relations - is affected by chemistry.
Linus Pauling
#39. Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.
Linus Torvalds
#40. No evidence compels the conclusion that the minimum required intake of any vitamin comes close to the optimum intake that sustains good health.
Linus Pauling
#41. I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.
Linus Torvalds
#42. I hear from patients who say their doctor said, 'If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won't harm you, and it may do you some good.' More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.
Linus Pauling
#43. It seems to me that whatever path you choose to take, in the end its up to each of us to try, test and live what we find out, to apply it and see what actually works, and that's the exciting and challenging part of this very real adventure.
Linus Roache
#44. Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'.
Linus Torvalds
#45. No!" Linus sounds really shocked. Shocked, embarrassed, discomfited. Kind of mortified. Like he can't believe I would say that. (I'm getting all this from one syllable, you understand.)
Sophie Kinsella
#46. Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.
Linus Torvalds
#47. There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
Linus Torvalds
#48. I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' ... The twenty-five percent is for error.
Linus Pauling
#49. We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same mechanism used in producing these striking structures that are crystals.
Linus Pauling
#50. Linus entered the elevator while the grownups talked and looked at the buttons. Buttons covered all the walls, and even the door. He pressed one, and with the luck that comes to children in fancy hotels, it was the fire alarm.
Ella Minster
#51. New York, without a doubt, is my favorite city in the world.
Linus Roache
#52. A spiritual life is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How do you live? What's true? How do you respond? It's not about living by beliefs; it's about wanting to know.
Linus Roache
#53. The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.
Linus Pauling
#54. [Professor Pauling] confesses that he had harboured the feeling that sooner or later he would be the one to get the DNA structure; and although he was pleased with the double-helix, he 'rather wished the idea had been his'.
Linus Pauling
#55. The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
Linus Torvalds
#56. Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.
Linus Torvalds
#57. Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both.
Linus Torvalds
#58. Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do
Linus Torvalds
#59. I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.
Linus Torvalds
#60. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.
Linus Pauling
#61. I lose sleep if I end up feeling bad about something I've said. Usually that happens when I send something out without having read it over a few times, or when I call somebody names.
Linus Torvalds
#62. I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.
Linus Torvalds
#63. Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.
Linus Torvalds
#64. I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.
Linus Torvalds
#65. Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
Linus Torvalds
#66. The Vikings themselves are fascinating creatures. They're human beings, of course, but their ethos are so different from ours. The fact that they live as warriors - their willingness to die for the sake of what they believe in - is quite shocking to us, and it's fascinating to see.
Linus Roache
#68. Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.
Linus Torvalds
#69. Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.
Linus Torvalds
#71. Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.
Linus Pauling
#72. I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
Linus Torvalds
#73. Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
Richard Stallman
#74. In modern times, if you're on an airplane and it's going down, that's it. You've got a couple of minutes, if that, to work out where you stand in relationship to the whole of your life.
Linus Roache
#75. So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.
Linus Torvalds
#76. I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.
Linus Torvalds
#77. [David Harker asked: Dr Pauling, how do you have so many good ideas?]
Well David, I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.
Linus Pauling
#78. So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous ...
Linus Torvalds
#79. I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.
Linus Torvalds
#80. There is no safe amount of radiation. Even small amounts do harm.
Linus Pauling
#81. The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12 and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.
Linus Torvalds
#82. Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.
Linus Torvalds
#83. Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot.
Linus Torvalds
#84. Linus Pauling famously said, If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas.
Anonymous
#85. See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.
Linus Torvalds
#86. I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.
Linus Torvalds
#87. One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.
Linus Torvalds
#88. I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters
Linus Torvalds
#89. Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.
Linus Torvalds
#90. People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.
Linus Torvalds
#91. If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.
Linus Torvalds
#92. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
#93. Generosity generates income. This works whether you are selling paintings or innovation or a service. Linus
Seth Godin
#94. The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.
Linus Torvalds
#95. See the valentine I made for Linus? On the inside, I wrote, To my sweet babboo."
"He says he's not your sweet babboo."
"What does he know?
Charles M. Schulz
#96. Linus Lucas was fourteen years old, a number that made the spoons fall right out of our mouths.
Heather O'Neill
#97. I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.
Linus Pauling
#98. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Linus Torvalds
#99. In teaching, you do not want to COVER things, you want to UNCOVER them. The best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
#100. Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is right or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law.
Linus Torvalds
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