Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by John McAfee

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman John McAfee.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
John McAfee

John David McAfee was a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and two-time presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and 2020. In 1987, he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software, founding McAfee Associates to sell his creation. He resigned in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company. McAfee became the company's most vocal critic in later years, urging consumers to uninstall the company's anti-virus software, which he characterized as bloatware. He disavowed the company's continued use of his name in branding, a practice that has persisted in spite of a short-lived corporate rebrand attempt under Intel ownership.

There is dissatisfaction in all of us. Some of us take out that dissatisfaction by attempting to ruin whatever you are attempting to do. This is a fact of life.
Do you think the Chinese think twice about hiring a hacker with a mohawk or a tattooed face? No.
Any idiot can make money. Keeping money, very few can do. — © John McAfee
Any idiot can make money. Keeping money, very few can do.
The most promising privacy thing is stupid phones. I'm dumping all my smart phones.
Governments are composed of human beings, and all of the frailties that humans possess are absorbed into these governments and become active within these governments. Hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, greed, distrust and the whole host of afflictions that humans must bear, lurk just beneath the surface of civility displayed by 'government.'
Making money is easy. It is. The difficult thing in life is not making it, it's keeping it.
The government can spy on people using their mobile phones while they're with their wives and husbands.
Steve Jobs was a friend and mentor whom I miss more than I can say.
Security is a human problem.
Really, what the government is asking Apple to do is to make every individual who uses an iPhone susceptible to hacking by bad people, foreign governments, and anyone who wants.
I have started many companies now worth more than $100 million. So I know a little about business.
We are losing privacy at an alarming rate - we have none left.
The government generally is just too top-heavy.
I would be very happy to go to America. America is where I was raised and that's exactly what I want. — © John McAfee
I would be very happy to go to America. America is where I was raised and that's exactly what I want.
I had disagreements with all my neighbors about my dogs. I had a disagreement with myself about my dogs. They were noisy.
In this age of communications that span both distance and time, the only tool we have that approximates a 'whisper' is encryption. When I cannot whisper in my wife's ear or the ears of my business partners, and have to communicate electronically, then encryption is our tool to keep our secrets secret.
The beauty of knowing yourself is nobody else has to.
People are afraid of their own lives. Shouldn't your goal be to have a meaningful life? Unknown, mysterious, thrilling?
I cannot conceive of how more than 1% of us could possibly survive a cyberwar.
My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed.
The Deep Web contains shockingly valuable information. Can you imagine how cancer research would blossom if every researcher had instant access to every research paper done by every single university and research lab in the world?
If operating in a network environment, do not place public domain or shareware programs in a common file-server directory that could be accessible to any other PC on the network.
I am not in any way a conspiracy theorist and have no time for such nonsense.
Hackers rarely have full knowledge of the technology stack of a target.
A hacker is someone who uses a combination of high-tech cybertools and social engineering to gain illicit access to someone else's data.
Social engineering has become about 75% of an average hacker's toolkit, and for the most successful hackers, it reaches 90% or more.
We live in a very insecure world with a very insecure communications platform.
Hillary Clinton was asked if she wiped the disc she was using for her email; she said, 'Do you mean with a damp cloth?' This, to me, is frightening.
There's not a single flashlight app that's not spying on you right now.
Living with one woman is horrific.
You'll see a movie about someone you hate or someone you love. Will you see a movie about grandma making apple pies? No, you won't. Only if grandma has poisoned the neighbor or is suspected of poisoning the neighbor through her apple pies.
My relationship has never been good with the government.
I trust and use RakEM for my private messages and calls. Other messengers collected metadata about who I messaged, when and where - RakEM does not collect metadata, encrypts local files, and uses the strongest end-to-end encryption around.
I'm an entrepreneur. I always have been. I am curious, and I enjoy solving problems.
I was one of the first practitioners of social engineering as a hacking technique, and today it is my only tool of use, aside from a smartphone - in a purely white hat sort of way. But if you don't trust me, then ask any reasonably competent social engineer.
Dwight Eisenhower warned American citizens at the end of his presidency about the implications of the military-industrial complex and its influence over government. We have now gone well beyond any of the wildest imaginations that could have entered Eisenhower's mind.
There are always losers when society evolves. In the free market, these losers are expected and encouraged to retrain and find new ways to survive and thrive.
My most heartfelt thank you goes to Impact Future Media and Cartoon Monkey Studio. Their dedication to the truth is very uncommon in the world we live in today. I am now, and will always be, grateful to their organizations.
An angry people cannot create anything that is not imbued with anger. — © John McAfee
An angry people cannot create anything that is not imbued with anger.
I will not stop my blog.
I've been called 'paranoid,' 'schizophrenic,' 'the wild child of Silicon Valley.'
Limit use of shareware and public domain software to systems without fixed disks. If you do use them on fixed disks, allocate separate subdirectories... Public domain or shareware software should never be placed in the root directory.
Donald Trump is proud of the fact that he's never written an e-mail.
The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.
Jealousy, greed, fear. We're all full of these things. But also love and compassion. If you saw a drowning baby, it wouldn't matter if you were wearing a tuxedo on the way to your own wedding. You'd jump in to save him.
Our mobile phones have become the greatest spy on the planet.
There will be an electronic currency, and it will be universal, and we must accept that fact.
I simply refuse to play by the rules.
As the economy goes south, petty theft begins. And then grand theft. And then muggings. — © John McAfee
As the economy goes south, petty theft begins. And then grand theft. And then muggings.
Success, for me, is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.
A simple social engineering hack might involve leaving a thumb drive on the pavement close to the driver's door of a car.
Marketing is the obverse of programming.
Let me tell you what the truth is... I have learned one thing in life: there is no such thing as bad press. There is not. That's a fundamental truth. The more bad things said about you, the more power they give to you.
The most astonishing subset of the Deep Web is a collection of dark alleys called the Dark Web. The Dark Web is generally thought of as a collection of criminal elements intent on subverting the law, stealing our money, and possibly kidnapping our daughters.
We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe.
The gig economy is empowerment. This new business paradigm empowers individuals to better shape their own destiny and leverage their existing assets to their benefit.
I think the thing that our government lacks - just about more than anything else - is technological competence. We have some of the greatest white-hat hackers in the world here in the U.S., but the government seems to be technologically illiterate.
I simply would like to live comfortably day by day, fish, swim, enjoy my declining years.
I would describe myself as quite sane and lucid, which is why I'm still alive.
I am just a thorn in everybody's side.
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