All Quotes

"His conflict with the Catholic Church arose because deep in his heart Galileo was a believer. There was for him no path of compromise, no way to have separate secular and theological cosmologies. If the Copernican system was true as he believed, what else could Galileo do but fight with every weapon he had in his arsenal... to make his Church accept a new system of the universe. ...In the contrast between Galileo's heroic stand when he tried to reform the cosmological basis of orthodox theology and his humbled, kneeling surrender when he disavowed his Copernicanism, we may sense the tremendous forces attendant on the birth of modern science."

"The pre-Galilean thinkers were... concerned with motion in the sense used by Aristotle. For them, "motion" was any process in which there was transmission from any state or condition to another state. Thus the process of aging, the change in a person's degree of wisdom, or the growth in the weight of a boy could all be considered examples of motion. By contrast Galileo was concerned with physical motion, motion involving a change of place... One of the major kinds of motion that Galileo studied was the motion of free fall."

"In his founding treatise, the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Galileo boasted that he was setting forth "a very new science dealing with a very ancient subject." ...No one before him, he declared, had discovered that "the distance traversed, during [successive] equal intervals of time, by a body falling from rest, stand to one another in the same ratio as the odd numbers beginning with unity." ...Galileo's rule can be expressed differently, that the total distance fallen is proportional to the square of the total elapsed time. ...he devised an experiment in which he "diluted" gravity, slowing down the motion of falling. For this purpose he used an inclined plane... He allowed a small metal ball to roll down the board at different inclinations, and recorded the distances and times. ...Galileo presented the numerical values that he found in his experiments as proof... Thus he could proudly boast of an agreement to within "one-tenth of a pulse beat.""

"Koyré's exaltation of the "Platonic and Pythagorean" elements of the Scientific Revolution... was based on a demonstrably false understanding of how Galileo reached his conclusions. Koyré asserted that Galileo merely used experiments as a check on the theories he devised by mathematical reasoning. But later research has definitively established that Galileo's experiments preceded his attempts to give a mathematical account of their results."

"For measurements of time he collected and weighed water flowing from a container at a constant rate of about three fluid ounces per second, He recorded weights of water in grains and, and defined his time unit, called a tempo, to be the time for 16 grains of water to flow, which was equivalent to 1/92 second. These units were small enough so Galileo's measurements of distance and time always resulted in large numbers. That was a necessity because decimal numbers were not part of his mathematical equipment; the only way he could add significant digits in his calculations was to make the numbers larger."

"Galileo was the first scientist to recognise clearly that the only way to further our understanding of the physical world was to resort to experiment. ...the Greeks, in spite of their proficiency in geometry, never seem to have realised the importance of experiment (Democritus and Archimedes excepted). ...an excuse ...can scarcely be put forward when the elementary nature of Galileo's experiments and observations is recalled. Watching a lamp oscillate in the cathedral of Pisa, dropping bodies from the leaning tower of Pisa, rolling balls down inclined planes, noticing the magnifying effect of water in a spherical glass vase... might just as well have been performed by the Greeks."

"[hugging Sharon] Merry xmas....now fuck off."

"I like warming my butt by the fire."

"If you want to be fucking individual, don't get a tattoo. Every fucker's got one these days."

"I am a new and reformed Christian follower, I Love God"

"I am a raging alcoholic, but I don't want my kids to do the same."

"I love you all; I love you more than life itself, but you're all fucking mad!"

"I keep hearing this [expletive] thing that guns don't kill people, but people kill people."

"Who the fuck is Justin Bieber?"

"Bubbles! Oh come on Sharon! I'm fucking Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of fucking Darkness. Evil! Evil! What's fucking evil about a buttload of fucking bubbles!?"

"We are not going to continue until we hear the fucking roof rattle."

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"

"Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!"

"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix."

"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs."

"Well, I probably won't get too good grades even without you: I had an argument (completely unrelated – not even pertaining to OS's) with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn :)"

"No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical."

"Dijkstra probably hates me."

"When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*""

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

"You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now."

"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program."

"It's a bird … it's a plane … no, it's KernelMan, faster than a speeding bullet, to your rescue. Doing new kernel versions in under 5 seconds flat …"

"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."

"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)"

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

"If you still don't like it, that's OK: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do."

"…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it."

"The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea."

"Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did."

"(In answer to the question: In the extreme case, if it was just you doing all the code, and the rest of the world quietly used it, would it make sense to give it away free? Unless you're particularly grateful for other free things you've got off the Net, would the answer be No?":)"

"I was thrown out of fourth grade because I couldn't write my own name, and it's been all downhill from there."

"I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination."

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well."

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

"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."

"Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver."

"To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs."

"Yeah. And as Linus once said: most numerical problems today in pure CPU cycles are actually 3D games. … It's not "incorrect" to say that you want the result faster, even if that result doesn't match your theoretical models."

"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."

"Hey, that's not a bug, that's a FEATURE! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, AND:"

"I allege that SCO is full of it."

"They are smoking crack."

"Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain."