Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Esther Dyson - Page 2

New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there's some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.

Internet becoming accessible everywhere, whether it was Wi-Fi at work, on your cell phone as you traveled. People had it at home with broadband. There was a big change.It used to be people used the Internet primarily at work, because that's where they had a good connection. Now they're using it at home. And the second big change is, they used it not just to get information, but to communicate with one another. And, so, it became not simply an information exchange, but a personal exchange, a communication mechanism.

I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.

I think we really made a mistake in separating the Internet from capitalism in a certain way that is bad for our country.

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.

The Internet is an incredible business tool. First of all, the Internet/the cell phone - the cell phone is just another way to get at it - I think is having a huge impact in Africa most particularly, where it enables people - suddenly, they know crop prices. They can communicate. It makes their lives more efficient.

It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.

Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.

The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.

People have to understand that they can reject technology. They can turn off their cell phone. They can stop looking at their e-mail. It's there if they want it. It's not being forced on them.

We had made a - sort of a national decision that we wanted to be this intellectual property country, where we would have things manufactured in China, but we would do the design, we would do the creative stuff.And now what we have done is, we have forgotten that that's what we wanted, and we're making the intellectual stuff more and more free. And, so, we're sort of left with less and less.

If the past decade was the decade of searching and finding and looking for stuff, this coming decade is going to be the decade of filtering and going to your friends for recommendations.

The Net is not a single home. Rather, it's an environment where thousands of small homes and communities can form and define and design themselves.

No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.

People need to understand that the technology is for them. It's not to them. It's not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.

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.

I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality --> immortal mistakes.

People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there's a default that works pretty well. That's this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it's handy.

Listening to other companies' customers is the best way to gain market share, while listening to the visionaries is the best way to create new markets.

I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.

The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump.

I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.

It looks simple to come up with a tablet that works, but it is not, ... In order to have the power and portability you need, you need power. The screen is the part of the device that uses the most power.