Hillis Quotes

#1. We are nothing more than a dot amongst the billions of organisms on the Hillis plot

Soroosh Shahrivar

#2. If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.

Larry Ellison

#3. What people mean by the word "technology" is the stuff that doesn't really work yet.

Danny Hillis

#4. You can't discriminate against someone because of their race, color, or religion, but you can discriminate against someone because of their sexual preference, I find it to be abhorrent.

Rib Hillis

#5. [Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

Danny Hillis

#6. I always felt safe and protected. My dad is 6'6 and 280 pounds, so I basically felt protected, and I aspire to have my kids feel the same way.

Rib Hillis

#7. Picking on another person in their mind justifies and makes their stature higher. People do it interracially. It's amazing how every race, every culture seems to have a culture they pick on.

Rib Hillis

#8. Self-reliance can turn a salesman into a merchant; a politician into a statesman; an attorney into a jurist; an unknown youth into a great leader. All are to be tomorrow's big leaders - those who in solitude sit above the clang and dust of time, with the world's secret trembling on their lips.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#9. If transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds.

W. Daniel Hillis

#10. People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium.

W. Daniel Hillis

#11. If you feel like you're not where you want to be in your life, rather than step on someone else's, raise your stature.

Rib Hillis

#12. It is a curious fact that personal possessions take on fictitious values and exceptional charms when the owner, no matter how generous, is faced with giving them away or even selling them (which usually amounts to the same thing).

Marjorie Hillis

#13. Abiding happiness is not simply a possibility, but a duty all may live above the troubles of life worry is a poison and happiness is a medicine.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#14. You can have your beliefs and have your faith, but don't try to impose it one me, and vice versa.

Rib Hillis

#15. Friendship warms like a sunbeam; charms like a good story; inspires like a brave leader; binds like a golden chain; guides like a heavenly vision ...

Newell Dwight Hillis

#16. Design: holding conflicting ideas in your head without difficulty

Danny Hillis

#17. Man must make his choice between ease and wealth; either may be his, but not both.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#18. I can imagine that if you're a kid growing up somewhere, where you might be gay or you think you're gay, but you don't know who else would be ... you become very closeted.

Rib Hillis

#19. Technology is everything that doesn't work yet.

W. Daniel Hillis

#20. Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies' Aid worker if you must, but for heaven's sake, be something.

Majorie Hillis

#21. It is a regrettable, but undeniable, fact that the most delightful people are seldom big money-makers.

Marjorie Hillis

#22. Our world is a college, events are teachers, happiness is the graduating point, character is the diploma God gives man.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#23. Give thy mind to books and libraries, and the literature and lore of the ages will give thee the wisdom of sage and seer.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#24. A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

Danny Hillis

#25. There are hundreds who don't know the difference between a cleansing cream and an emollient - which to our minds is practically the same as being illiterate.

Marjorie Hillis

#26. Remember that nothing is so damaging to self-esteem as waiting for a telephone or door-bell that doesn't ring.

Marjorie Hillis

#27. There is absolutely no scientific basis or evidence for 'intelligent design.' It is simply a religious assertion, and it has no place in a science course.

David Hillis

#28. I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine.

Danny Hillis

#29. Happiness is through helpfulness. Every morning let us build a booth to shelter some one from life's fierce heat. Every noon let us dig some life-spring for thirsty lips.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#30. Hateful people put fear in other people.

Rib Hillis

#31. In almost every technology area that we're ahead in, we're ahead in because the United States leads the world in computers.

W. Daniel Hillis

#32. What we need is a plan B ... independent of the Internet. [It] doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department.

Danny Hillis

#33. The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

Danny Hillis

#34. A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

W. Daniel Hillis

#35. Never, never, never let yourself feel that anybody ought to do anything for you. Once you become a duty you also become a nuisance.

Marjorie Hillis

#36. Quantity equals scale weight.

Josh Hillis

#37. Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.

Danny Hillis

#38. If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.

Danny Hillis

#39. When I was younger, I had an older brother a year and a half older than me, so we always had each other, and I felt very fortunate in that regard.

Rib Hillis

#40. Your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do.

W. Daniel Hillis

#41. Certainly, affairs should not even be thought of before you are thirty.

Marjorie Hillis

#42. We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

Danny Hillis

#43. Even though [bullying] doesn't actually raise your stature, it might make you feel that way.

Rib Hillis

#44. Failure is blindness to the strategic element in events; success is readiness for instant action when the opportune moment arrives.

Newell Dwight Hillis

#45. I have 8-year-old twins, and I want them to grow up in a world where they can be anyone they want without any shame, without holding back, without being judged for it.

Rib Hillis

#46. An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.

Danny Hillis