Vinton Cerf Quotes

Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.

Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.

We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster.

Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.

There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.

Surf the Web is a happy coincidence.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led Net crackdown.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.

The Internet lives where anyone can access it.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.

In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.

Now, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.

I'm disappointed in people in general.

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

The hackers don't want to destroy the network. They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it.

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we're in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration's course ignores reality.

Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.

Although I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.

So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.

The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now.

I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.

Privacy may actually be an anomaly.

Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.

We live in a very complex world.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.

If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.

People's motivations haven't changed in maybe 400 or maybe 4,000 years.

What's wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn't matter what else is going on.

There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.

I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.