Nicholas Negroponte

United States
Born on 1 Dec 1943
Scientist

Quotes



Generally, large companies are so inwardly directed that staff memorandums about growing bureaucracy get more attention than the dwindling competitive advantage of being big in the first place. David, who has a life, needn't use a slingshot. Goliath, who doesn't, is too busy reading office memos.

Wired Magazine (1995)
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.
As large, high-tech corporations around the world reengineer themselves by downsizing and rightsizing, the first casualty is basic research. And with good reason. The uncertainty, the risk-reward ratio, and the sheer expense come at too high a price for a cost-conscious society, which includes belt-tightening managers and nearsighted shareholders.

Wired Magazine (1996)
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.

Wired Magazine (1998)
Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy. New concepts and big steps forward, in a very real sense, come from left field, from a mixture of people, ideas, backgrounds, and cultures that normally are not mixed.

Wired Magazine (1995)
The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

Wired Magazine (1996)
It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the preceding one.

Being Digital (1995)
Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.

Being Digital (1995)
Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.

Being Digital (1995)
One way to look at the future being digital is to ask if the quality of one medium can be transposed to another.

Being Digital (1995)
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays