Nicholas Negroponte

“My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.”

“This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.”

“Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”

“Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.”

“By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It bothers me when people spoil the market.”

“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.”

“I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.”

“Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.”

“Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they... can never be without some element of education.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.”

“Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.”