Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Vinton Cerf

Surf the Web is a happy coincidence.

Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, .. We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications.

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

In the Internet world, both ends essentially pay for access to the Internet system, and so the providers of access get compensated by the users at each end. My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers' ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.

It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.

Google’s objective is to organize the world’s information and to make it accessible. Unicode plays a central role in this effort because it is the principal means by which content in every language can be represented in a form that can be processed by software. As Unicode extends its coverage of the world’s languages, it helps Google accomplish its mission.

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster.

I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.

What's wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn't matter what else is going on.

Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.

Now, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.

I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

My belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.

Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in '71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard of hearing community as well.

The Internet reflects the societies in which we live, and so the content on the Net and some of the abuses that you see on the Net are reflections of that.

The hackers don't want to destroy the network. They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it.

If you are deaf, you need captions for spoken elements. If you are blind, you need voiced descriptions of Web contents and spoken renderings of e-mail. The range of physical disabilities is very large, and we need many different tools to overcome the consequential barriers to Internet use. Let us commit ourselves to truly assuring that the Internet really is for everyone.

Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.

At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led Net crackdown.

I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.

The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now.

There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.

In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

People's motivations haven't changed in maybe 400 or maybe 4,000 years.

Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

I'm disappointed in people in general.