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.

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

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.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.