I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we.

Microsoft is a bully. Microsoft is trying to hoodwink nontechnical people.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

One can imagine the government's problem. This is all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?

In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today .. and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

You affect the world by what you browse.

Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers.

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital.

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features.

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

Everything that can be invented, has been invented.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

The Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You've got to get through it.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.

Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.

Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line.

Microsoft is engaging in unlawful predatory practices that go well beyond the scope of fair competition.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."

At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

The computer is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.

We're making a major move of the Internet, and runway.polo.com is a natural extension of both polo.com and our collection business.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.

The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.

Computers shouldn't be unusable. You don't need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world.

If you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they'd think it was a garage-door opener.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed...

Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.

A friend called me up the other day and talked about investing in a dot-com that sells lobsters. Internet lobsters. Where will this end? The next day he sent me a huge package of lobsters on ice. How low can you stoop?

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

It's [the internet] like the flu - it just spreads like crazy.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

What's sort of interesting about the whole public relations disaster that is the Net, in some ways, is that the fundamentals are really good.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine.

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.