Best 110 quotes of Tim Berners-lee on MyQuotes

Acceptance is the spiritual hammock.

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.

AI is not just heading for our industry, it will radically change the machinery we use in marketing.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

As more and more people awaken to the threats against our basic rights online, we must start a debate - everywhere - about the web we want.

Celebrity damages private life.

Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly.

Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.

Cool URIs don't change

Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

E-mail is interesting. We can't live with it, and you can't live without it.

Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.

Forming of a web of information nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the basic concept behind HyperText.

Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.

I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.

If different cultures connect with each other, they are less likely to want to shoot each other.

If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.

I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.

I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.

I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exit.

Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.

I'm an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.

I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.

I'm very aware there are lots of other people who are just bright and working just as hard, with just the same dedication to make the world a good place.

I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.

In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices.

I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

I think, in general, it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings - and the Web's a form of communications - so it generally should be good.

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems - about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.

IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

It's a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently.

It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.

It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.

It's time to recognise the internet as a basic human right. That means guaranteeing affordable access for all, ensuring internet packets are delivered without commercial or political discrimination, and protecting the privacy and freedom of web users regardless of where they live.

It was never clear that it wouldn't just stop (the WWW). Any time during that exponential growth, it could have stalled. I think we were never very confident until 1993.

It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.

It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.

I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.