Top 75 Nicholas Negroponte Quotes
#1. Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.
Nicholas Negroponte
#3. Very often kids don't ask questions in class because they don't want to be seen asking a question.
Nicholas Negroponte
#4. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#5. Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.
Nicholas Negroponte
#6. Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.
Nicholas Negroponte
#9. By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.
Nicholas Negroponte
#10. MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.
Nicholas Negroponte
#11. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#12. This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
Nicholas Negroponte
#13. [Industrial design in 50 years] will be less about looks and more about personality of artifacts.
Nicholas Negroponte
#14. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#15. I'm not against paying at all. What I'm against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it's free, but you have to fill out this form.
Nicholas Negroponte
#16. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#17. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#18. My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.
Nicholas Negroponte
#19. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#21. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#22. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#23. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#24. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#26. Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.
Nicholas Negroponte
#27. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#28. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#29. Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.
Nicholas Negroponte
#31. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#32. The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.
Nicholas Negroponte
#33. Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.
Nicholas Negroponte
#34. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#35. Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
Nicholas Negroponte
#36. 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?'
Nicholas Negroponte
#37. The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.
Nicholas Negroponte
#38. The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.
Nicholas Negroponte
#39. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#40. Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource.
Nicholas Negroponte
#41. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#42. Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there's a morning shift and an afternoon shift.
Nicholas Negroponte
#43. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#44. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#45. Google has a very powerful and new advertising model that, for them, prints money.
Nicholas Negroponte
#46. Nations have the wrong granularity. They're too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.
Nicholas Negroponte
#47. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#48. One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.
Nicholas Negroponte
#49. Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.
Nicholas Negroponte
#51. Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.
Nicholas Negroponte
#52. 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?
Nicholas Negroponte
#54. What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.
Nicholas Negroponte
#55. The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas.
Nicholas Negroponte
#56. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#58. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#59. Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
Nicholas Negroponte
#60. In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child."
Nicholas Negroponte
#61. Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
Nicholas Negroponte
#62. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#65. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#67. We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.
Nicholas Negroponte
#68. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#69. Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
Nicholas Negroponte
#70. I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that.
Nicholas Negroponte
#71. It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.
Nicholas Negroponte
#72. Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Nicholas Negroponte
#74. 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.
Nicholas Negroponte
#75. Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they ... can never be without some element of education.
Nicholas Negroponte
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
