Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Nicholas Negroponte - Page 2

There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.

Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.

When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

I had come to a stage in life where I didn't need to earn an income, I didn't need to earn a reputation, I didn't need fame, I didn't need any of the things you might want in your early career.

Very often kids don't ask questions in class because they don't want to be seen asking a question.

The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.

I think life's turning into an omelet and people will just have to live with that.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?

In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child."

It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call.

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

[Industrial design in 50 years] will be less about looks and more about personality of artifacts.

MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.

Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.

Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.

Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there's a morning shift and an afternoon shift.

What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

Taxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate - the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.