“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.”

As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.

As quoted by Werner Herzog, in My Best Fiend, (1999)

in 2014, Overland literary journal

Stephen Sondheim in an interview with David Patrick Stearns, Classical Music Critic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 2009 https://archive.is/20130630031503/www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20090219_An_upbeat_Sondheim__offering_answers.html?viewAll=y

relating his experimental confirmation of the fine structure spectrum of hydrogen, as reported by [Jagdish Mehra, The historical development of quantum theory, Springer, 2001, 0387950869, 1037]