Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The wild, the absurd, the seemingly crazy: this kind of thinking is where new ideas come from ... The people capable of such playful thought carry forward their childish qualities and childhood dreams, applying them in areas where most of us get stuck, victims of our adult seriousness. Staying a child isn't easy.

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.

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.

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

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

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

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.

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

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.

There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.

You go to developing countries today and you'll find automobiles that you haven't seen since you're childhood and that's because they really are valuable, they're taken care of, they're repaired, and when something breaks, they just don't buy a new one, they actually fix it.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

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.

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

I'd like to describe a sort of life 20 years ago as being a fried egg.

There was a yolk and a white and the white was maybe work, and the yolk was life. Today, it's more of an omelet. It's more mixed and it's more interspersed and I think that that's a more interesting state of being and for some people, they'll say well I want the crisp, fried egg approach to life.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

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.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

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?'

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.

When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

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

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.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

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

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they .

.. can never be without some element of education.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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