Esther Dyson

“Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.”

“I think there are too many start-ups and not enough real companies.”

“I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.”

“Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.”

“Normal people with normal lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just take the stuff with sugar in it.”

“Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.”

“A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.”

“What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.”

“I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.”

“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.”

“I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.”

“In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.”

“There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.”

“Doing something totally new is tricky. If you are second - and if you are smart - you can learn from the first person's mistakes.”

“Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.”

“Summer is conference season - a critical time for building brands, making connections, and shaping industries.”

“But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.”

“Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.”

“From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”

“I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.”