Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Jamie Zawinski

You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.

If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it?

I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.

Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless.

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely.

I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

I eat and drink at my desk, but I'm a tidy eater.

My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!

The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school.

The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!

C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out.

You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.

Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation.

Your needs are big because the Internet is big.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates.

To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.

If you give a cracker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is carve his initials in it. Fortunately, most crackers get over that once they're through puberty.

These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely.

There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.