Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Esther Dyson

My greatest vulnerability is that I'm not 'normal.' I'm not married, I don't have children. It's something I feel defensive about.

I have had the same apartment in New York City for almost 40 years but have actually lived in it for less than half of that time, owing to a busy travel schedule.

I became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter 'Release 1.0,' which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

Since I was 18, I have swum for 50 minutes every day, missing less than one day a year except for a two-week stint when I was training as a cosmonaut in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in March 2009.

It offends me when people do useless work.

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes - I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing.

And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.

That's really why I want to go to space - I want to be weightless for so long that it gets boring.

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

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

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

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

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

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.

I'm cheap, and so I don't like wasting.

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

I enjoy it; my experiences abroad have taught me the importance of an open mind and have given me a willingness to wander off the beaten path - not only to keep life interesting, but also to understand in a meaningful way that things do not look the same from every vantage point.

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.

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

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

My life is like a series of comic strips, which is why I like investing: I really like new stuff.

The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane - those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

I have a short attention span. I couldn't stay doing the same thing for 30 years.

Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

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.

In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.

The challenge of ensuring adequate, nutrient-rich food for an expanding global population is a daunting one, especially given constraints on key resources like water and agricultural land.

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.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

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

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

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.

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

Anyone will tell you if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns. It's in your best interest.

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My ambition is to figure out how to help people create their own health and how to turn that into a profitable business.

You should not want to be a politician because you want to be president. You should be a politician because you want to fix the world or represent a movement.

The best entrepreneurs have a sense of purpose that drives them.

The challenge of email is that people send you stuff for free, and it becomes items on your to-do list.

Indeed, though people increasingly learn and interact online, we retain a fundamental need to engage in person.

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.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent.

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

The best investor is your customer.

As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland.

We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.

Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.

Always make new mistakes.

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.

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.

The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.