Nicholas Negroponte Quotes - Page 3

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

If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

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

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

While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

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

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

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

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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