Best 71 quotes of Nicholas Negroponte on MyQuotes

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.

Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.

But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.

Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they ... can never be without some element of education.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.

I'd like to describe a sort of life 20 years ago as being a fried egg. There was a yolk and a white and the white was maybe work, and the yolk was life. Today, it's more of an omelet. It's more mixed and it's more interspersed and I think that that's a more interesting state of being and for some people, they'll say well I want the crisp, fried egg approach to life.

If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.

If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?

I grew up with free television. Now, it wasn't free, there was these commercials, and so the economic model was driven through commercials and through advertising.

I'm not against paying at all. What I'm against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it's free, but you have to fill out this form.

I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

[Industrial design in 50 years] will be less about looks and more about personality of artifacts.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child.

I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that.

It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.

It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call.

It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.

I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.

Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.

Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.

Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.

MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.

Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there's a morning shift and an afternoon shift.

My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don't take no for an answer.

My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.

National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.

Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of peoples walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.

Taxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate - the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.