Nicholas Negroponte Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

“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.”

“Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.”

“Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient's point of view, that's zero.”

“It bothers me when people spoil the market.”

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

“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.”

“The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.”

“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?'”

“We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.”