Linus Torvalds > Quotes

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
― Linus Torvalds

“software is like sex : it's better when it's free..”
― Linus Torvalds

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
― Linus Torvalds

“I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
― Linus Torvalds

“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

“I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.”
― Linus Torvalds

“I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
― Linus Torvalds

“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

“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

“Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses.
Every single time.”
― Linus Torvalds

“A lot of people believe in working long days and doing dou­ble, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your produc­tive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“I did learn fairly early that the best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to. The best leaders also know when they are wrong, and are capable of pulling themselves out. And the best leaders enable others to make decisions for them.

Let me rephrase that. Much ofLinux's success can be attrib­uted to my own personality flaws: 1) I'm lazy; and 2) I like to get credit for the work of others.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters”
― Linus Torvalds

“For high school graduation in Finland, you wear a fluffy white hat with a black band. There's a ceremony in which they hand out diplomas, and when you come home all your relatives are there with lots of champagne, flowers, and cake. And there's also a party for the entire class at a local restaurant. We did all that, and I guess I had fun, but I don't remember anything special about it. But ask me about the specs on my 68008-chip machine and I can rattle them off with total recall.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better system.

And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say 'I don't care' with a straight face, and really mean it.”
― Linus Torvalds

“The theory behind open source is simple. In the case of an operating system, the source code-the programming instructions underlying the system-is free. Anyone can improve it, change it, exploit it. But those improvements, changes, and exploitations have to be made freely available. Think Zen. The project belongs to no one and to everyone. When a project is opened up, there is rapid and continual improvement. With teams of contributors working in parallel, the results can happen far more speedily and success­ fully than if the work were being conducted behind closed doors.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?”
― Linus Torvalds

“I want to decide for myself. I'm very much against unnecessary rules imposed by society. I'm a big believer that you should be able to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home as long as you don't hurt anybody else. Any law saying otherwise is a very, very broken law. And there are laws that say otherwise. I find
some scary rules, especially some that are imposed on schools and children. Imagine even thinking of imposing rules about teaching evolution, and taking that into the wrong direction. That I find scary. This is social conscience rearing its ugly head in places it really has nothing at all to do with.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“I did learn fairly early that the best and the most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That's when you get the best results.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“They are the motivational factors for everything in your life-for any­ thing that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is enter­tainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. Everything is moving in the same direction, but not at the same time. So basically sex has reached entertain­ment, war is close to it, technology is pretty much there. The new things are things that are just survival. Like, hopefully, space travel will at some point be an issue of survival, then it will be social, then entertainment. Look at civilization as a cult. I mean, that also follows the same pattern. Civilization starts as survival. You get together to survive better and you build up your social structure. Then eventually civilization exists purely for entertain­ment. Okay, well, not purely. And it doesn't have to be bad entertainment. The ancient Greeks are known for having had a very strong social order, and they also had a lot of entertainment. They're known for having had the best philosophers of their time.

So what this builds up to is that in the end we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“Do no harm”
― Linus Torvalds

“PS. I apologise for sometimes sounding too harsh: minix is nice enough
if you have nothing else. Amoeba might be nice if you have 5-10 spare
386's lying around, but I certainly don't. I don't usually get into
flames, but I'm touchy when it comes to linux :)”
― Linus Torvalds

“Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?”
― Linus Torvalds

“your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a
good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. I can only hope (and
assume) that Amoeba doesn't suck like minix does.”
― Linus Torvalds

“I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.”
― Linus Torvalds

“There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life––for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary