Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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.

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

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.

What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

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.

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

Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.

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.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

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

The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

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

The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas.

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.

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.

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?

This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.

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

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.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

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

When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.

Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource.

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.

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

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

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

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

The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential - small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

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

Very often kids don't ask questions in class because they don't want to be seen asking a question.

The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.

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

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

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.

While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

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