Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

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

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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