Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

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

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.

We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.

We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.

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

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.

When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.

The concept of the Web is of universal readership.

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.

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

What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.

We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"

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.

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.

My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.

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.

The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.

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.

Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.

People keep asking me what I think of it now that it's done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!

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

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

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.

The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.

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.

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.

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

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.

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

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.

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.

The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.

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.

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

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

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

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!

There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

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

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

One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.