Nicholas Negroponte famous quotes

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Learning #Technology #Computer

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

#Thinking #Debugging #Programming

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

#Technology #Computer #Literacy

Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Views #Juan

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Differences #Yesterday #Atoms

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Worry #Today #Want

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Digital #Transmission

Good education has got to be good entertainment.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Entertainment #Good Education #Be Good

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Mean #Self #Important

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

#Military #Years #Wind

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Creativity #Simple #Ideas

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Pride #Thinking #Agreement

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Drinking #Sea #Design

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

#Mit #Academic #Higher

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?
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Machines #Able

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Business #Innovation #Enemy

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

#Real #Technology #Skills

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

#Kids #Water #World

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

#Elements #Problem #Bigs

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Children #Firsts #Natural

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Thinking #Bigs #Competing

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Real #Educational #Ideas

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Vision #Peripheral Vision

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

#Believe #People #World

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Issues #World #Laptops

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

#Years #Way #Online

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

#Ideas #Common #Bigs

Scale will get you strategy.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Strategy #Scales

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 ... 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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Business #Real #Moving

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Order #Organization #Self

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Kids #Community #Laptops

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Mean #Kids #Writing

Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Dream #Thinking #People

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Research #Bigs #Term

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

#Running #People #Enemy

I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Ideas #Laptops #Selling

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

#Kids #Breathing #Air

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

#Goal #Laptops #Selling

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.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Ideas #Advice #Training

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

#Teaching #Peers #Computer

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

#Understanding #Cyberspace #Limits

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

#Self #Years #World

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.
-- Nicholas Negroponte

#Laptops #Kind