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

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.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

And my real enemy is not to hold the specimen sterile, but it's the lighting. The light is our real enemy. So we have to work with very very poor lighting. But we can increase the light with computers.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Well, we didn't have our original drummer on our last record. And most of that album was not played as a band in the studio. It was mostly the world of computers and overdubs. There was very few things played live or worked out as a band.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

Why does everyone think the future is space helmets, silver foil, and talking like computers, like a bad episode of Star Trek?

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.