Steven Levy Quotes

#1. We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.

Steven Levy

#2. [Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.

Steven Levy

#3. to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;

Steven Levy

#4. I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.

Steven Levy

#5. The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Steven Levy

#6. You can't argue with facts. You're not entitled to your own facts.

Steven Levy

#7. Find a way to delight in all students. Look for the best, expect the best, and find something in each child [you] can treasure.

Steven Levy

#8. The fact that biological, or 'natural' rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.

Steven Levy

#9. the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.

Steven Levy

#10. Inherently, Larry & Serge aren't paper-oriented - they're product oriented. If they have another 10 minutes, they want to make something better. They don't want to take 10 minutes to tell you something they did.
- Terry Winograd

Steven Levy

#11. There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Steven Levy

#12. At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for 'yes.'

Steven Levy

#13. Ideas ... [are] like babies - everything about their environment [says] they shouldn't exist. But they do. You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.
(Attributed to Mike Jones)

Steven Levy

#14. Computer technology is so built into our lives that it's part of the surround of every artist.

Steven Levy

#15. Central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.

Steven Levy

#16. To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.

Steven Levy

#17. She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.

Steven Levy

#18. Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

Steven Levy

#19. You can create art and beauty with a computer.

Steven Levy

#20. Ideas, Mike Jones, an engineer at Google explained, were like babies - everything about their environment said they shouldn't exist. But they do. You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.

Steven Levy

#21. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.

Steven Levy

#22. Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.

Steven Levy