Ted Nelson Quotes

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.

I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.

Let me introduce the word 'hypertext' to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.

The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.

History is fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated, yet always repeating patterns.

The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.

I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?

Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death.

Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

We live in media, as fish live in water.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

Right now you are a prisoner of each application you use. You have only the options that were given you by the developer of that application.

You can and must understand computers now.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.

The Web is trivially simple - massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead.

Making things easy is hard.