Top 160 Linus Torvalds Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”

— Linus Torvalds

102. “I’ve felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn’t have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.”

— Linus Torvalds

103. “No problem is too big it can’t be run away from.”

— Linus Torvalds

104. “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

105. “Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they’re involved and taking it personally.”

— Linus Torvalds

106. “When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.”

— Linus Torvalds

107. “I think one thing I do pretty well is not taking myself too seriously.”

— Linus Torvalds

108. “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

109. “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 100mph. They’d be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.”

— Linus Torvalds

110. “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.”

— Linus Torvalds

111. “Any program is only as good as it is useful.”

— Linus Torvalds

112. “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

113. “I’m generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.”

— Linus Torvalds

114. “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

115. “When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.”

— Linus Torvalds

116. “If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.”

— Linus Torvalds

117. “In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won’t end up like the Hurd people.”

— Linus Torvalds

118. “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

119. “I don’t expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.”

— Linus Torvalds

120. “No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I’m somewhere between geek and normal.”

— Linus Torvalds

121. “I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don’t have to.”

— Linus Torvalds

122. “OK, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.”

— Linus Torvalds

123. “I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later.”

— Linus Torvalds

124. “I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it’s actually made cellphones very usable.”

— Linus Torvalds

125. “Helsinki isn’t all that bad. It’s a very nice city, and it’s cold really only in wintertime.”

— Linus Torvalds

126. “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

127. “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

128. “Making Linux GPL’d was definitely the best thing I ever did.”

— Linus Torvalds

129. “If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over, the end result is bad.”

— Linus Torvalds

130. “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

131. “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

132. “I see myself as a technical person who chose a great project and a great way of doing that project.”

— Linus Torvalds

133. “What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.”

— Linus Torvalds

134. “In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.”

— Linus Torvalds

135. “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

136. “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

137. “If you want an application to be portable, you don’t necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.”

— Linus Torvalds

138. “I never felt that the naming issue was all that important, but I was obviously wrong, judging by how many people felt. I tell people to call it just plain Linux and nothing more.”

— Linus Torvalds

139. “That’s what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It’s a positive feedback cycle.”

— Linus Torvalds

140. “I’ve been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they’ve been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.”

— Linus Torvalds

141. “One of the questions I’ve always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat – and there are a number of other Linux companies going public – basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.”

— Linus Torvalds

142. “To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don’t you? Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”

— Linus Torvalds

143. “While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using, and that people find to be the best alternative for their needs.”

— Linus Torvalds

144. “The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.”

— Linus Torvalds

145. “There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they’d still be wrong.”

— Linus Torvalds

146. “Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

— Linus Torvalds

147. “Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster.”

— Linus Torvalds

148. “So I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, say it follows some basic rules like it supported paging, then I would be able to say, yes, Linux fundamentally supports that model.”

— Linus Torvalds

149. “I made very sure that I did not get involved with any of the commercial Linux companies, exactly so that I would be neutral and not ever seen as “working for the competition”.”

— Linus Torvalds

150. “I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.”

— Linus Torvalds