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?'

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.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

In Hell all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you.

Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let's say, instruments for working.

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.

Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

There are a lot of people who've been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.

The biggest challenge has been simulating a tornado with wind machines and dirt and debris. Right when you walk on the set, you feel the energy of a tornado. But the hardest thing is trying to get dialogue out in all of that.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Let the machine take care of the machines, and I'll go spend more time with my family, or golf.

I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines.

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first - if you're not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines - ones that are no longer used.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.