Linus Torvalds Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Linus Torvalds
Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute shit there is!

Linus Torvalds
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

Linus Torvalds
Why don't we write code that just works? Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code that has years of testing? This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable. [...] Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines". Those two really do work.

Linus Torvalds
Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot.

Linus Torvalds
Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. 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. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

Linus Torvalds
If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

Linus Torvalds
Don't bother. Bram doesn't know what he's talking about.

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

Linus Torvalds
Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more.

Linus Torvalds
Even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code (and as far as I know, it does, but since I think they have their design heads firmly up their asses anyway with that whole microkernel thing, I've never felt it was worth my time even looking at their code), I don't believe a religiously motivated development community can ever generate as good code except by pure chance.

Linus Torvalds
People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization... that's what you should do.

Linus Torvalds
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
I have an ego the size of a small planet, but I'm not _always_ right [...].

Linus Torvalds
The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances. In other words, it's an Oracleism.

Linus Torvalds
But this is definitely another of those "This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Al-biwan Ke-Viro, you're my only hope" issues. Al? Please don't make me wear that golden bikini.

Linus Torvalds
I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.

Linus Torvalds
Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using PREEMPT_RT.

Linus Torvalds
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

Linus Torvalds