Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.

One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

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.

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

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

That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.

Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

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.

If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.

You affect the world by what you browse.

The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure . . . When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going to end in the U.S.A. If we had a situation in which the U.S. had serious flaws in its Net Neutrality, and Europe did have Net Neutrality, and I were trying to start a company, then I would be very tempted to move.

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.

Universality has been the key enabler of innovation on the Web and will continue to be so in the future.

When it comes to professionalism, it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. Standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.

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.

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

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

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.

Celebrity damages private life.

[With AI] Somebody's going to have to think of a completely new algorithm, a new way of doing goal-based planning.

Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.

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

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 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.

There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.

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.

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

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

When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value?

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.

You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.

[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

The more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

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

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

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

The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.

Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.

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.

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.

When you understand things, there's no more magic.

We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes.