By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

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

Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient's point of view, that's zero.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.

It bothers me when people spoil the market.

It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.

My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.

When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.

Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

I understand about this idea of terror and what it means to Americans and this idea that we can't just walk around free like we did; life has changed.

I mean, the reality is unemployment today - over 14 million Americans are unemployed. That's exactly what it was a year ago. I mean, this - the American people know we can't borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

Currently, not only are Americans taxed on what they earn, but those assets are taxed again when they are passed on to a loved one.

In 2001, Congress passed much needed tax relief to allow Americans to keep more of their hard earned money and spend it as they see fit - rather than how the federal government sees fit.

Most Americans approach the problems of the Middle East with a pro-Israeli bias - and rightly so.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

The poorest residents of the gulf coast were most affected by the devastating hurricanes, and the poorest Americans have shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden in Iraq.

The way Americans understand and treat other peoples almost guarantees that the world will suffer more trouble.