Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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.

You go to developing countries today and you'll find automobiles that you haven't seen since you're childhood and that's because they really are valuable, they're taken care of, they're repaired, and when something breaks, they just don't buy a new one, they actually fix it.

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

The wild, the absurd, the seemingly crazy: this kind of thinking is where new ideas come from ... The people capable of such playful thought carry forward their childish qualities and childhood dreams, applying them in areas where most of us get stuck, victims of our adult seriousness. Staying a child isn't easy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I had come to a stage in life where I didn't need to earn an income, I didn't need to earn a reputation, I didn't need fame, I didn't need any of the things you might want in your early career.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

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

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

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

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.

When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

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

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.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?

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

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

There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.

The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.

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