Top 100 Linus's Quotes
#1. I would like a cappuccino," says Linus politely. "Thank you."
"Your name?"
"I'll spell it for you," he says. "Z-W-P-A-E-N
"
"What?" She stares at him, Sharpie in hand.
"Wait, I haven't finished. Double F-hyphen-T-J-U-S. It's an unusual name, Linus adds gravely. "It's Dutch.
Sophie Kinsella
#2. Sabrina: "But you don't believe in marriage."
Linus: "Yes, I do. It's why I've never married.
Samuel Taylor
#3. I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.
Linus Torvalds
#4. I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.
Linus Pauling
#5. Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.
Linus Torvalds
#6. Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.
Linus Torvalds
#7. You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever thing to do.
Linus Torvalds
#8. In the end, it's your job to own the role, and in the end, you are playing certain aspects of your own self, even.
Linus Roache
#9. On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.
Linus Torvalds
#10. C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.
Linus Torvalds
#11. Trying to act cold is a challenge when your makeup's running and sweat is pouring down your neck.
Linus Roache
#12. To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.
Linus Torvalds
#13. That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.
Linus Torvalds
#14. Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling
#15. As an actor, when you're actually trying to embody what it would be like to just know that everyone's at your beck and call, it's quite a thing to absorb what that might be like and what that would do.
Linus Roache
#16. You have no idea what Linus is thinking. It could be good, it could be bad. Most likely, it's nothing at all. He's a boy. You'd better get used to that.
Sophie Kinsella
#17. If a doctor isn't 'up' on something, he's 'down' on it.
Linus Pauling
#18. It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear ... It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.
Marilyn Ferguson
#19. I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.
Linus Torvalds
#20. Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.
Linus Torvalds
#21. Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.
Linus Pauling
#22. I'm perfectly happy complaining, because it's cathartic, and I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming.
Linus Torvalds
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.
Linus Torvalds
#27. If you have ever done any security work - and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" - it wasn't security work, it was - masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.
Linus Torvalds
#28. The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.
Linus Torvalds
#29. There's so much cynicism around in Britain, especially in the press. The American press might be naive, but at least you feel as if they're on your side.
Linus Roache
#30. I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me.
Linus Torvalds
#31. I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
#32. Linus: It was a short summer, Charlie Brown.
Charlie Brown: And it looks like it's gonna be a looong winter.
Charles M. Schulz
#33. For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures.
Max Perutz
#34. It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.
Linus Torvalds
#35. Most of the TV shows I've done have all been in the U.S.
Linus Roache
#36. It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.
Linus Torvalds
#37. A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
#38. There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.
Linus Torvalds
#39. 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
#40. I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.
Linus Torvalds
#41. I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.
Linus Torvalds
#42. The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question.
Linus Torvalds
#43. I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.
Linus Torvalds
#44. There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.
Linus Torvalds
#45. software is like sex : it's better when it's free..
Linus Torvalds
#46. I love making friends ... it's people I can't stand.
Linus Torvalds
#47. The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.
Linus Torvalds
#49. I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.
Max F. Perutz
#50. I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.
Linus Torvalds
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.
Linus Torvalds
#56. People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.
Linus Torvalds
#57. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
Linus Torvalds
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#64. I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.
Linus Torvalds
#65. 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
#66. Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.
Linus Torvalds
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. I've been to India a lot, ever since when my mum was in 'Jewel In The Crown.'
Linus Roache
#71. An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.
Linus Torvalds
#72. Do unto others 20% better than you'd expect them to do unto you to correct subjective error.
Linus Pauling
#73. 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
#75. No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.
Linus Torvalds
#76. Every aspect of the world today - even politics and international relations - is affected by chemistry.
Linus Pauling
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.
Linus Torvalds
#89. Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.
Linus Pauling
#90. 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
#91. I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.
Linus Torvalds
#92. 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
#93. If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.
Linus Torvalds
#94. 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
#95. [Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.
Linus Pauling
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
