Quotes

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. (Part I, Chapter VII)

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials—these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether.

Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. (Chapter IX)

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.

Short cuts make long delays. (Book I, Chapter IV)

Grace: I don’t have the bravery gene that you all have.

Yao: It’s not a gene. You just need to find someone to be brave for.

Too many secrets. (clip)

Money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it. (clip)

Bishop: Mr. Abbott… are you interested in Setec Astronomy?

Abbott: I’m interested in all kinds of astronomy. (clip)

The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. […] It’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information. (clip)

The old wisdom borne out of the west was forsaken. Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living, and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry, or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin. (clip)

There are no secrets in a computer.

Hackers do their homework!

You make the habit, and the habit makes you.

Do the hard work early.

Between the states of confusion and frustration is learning.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed people run things and the two-eyed people are in for a rough time. We owe much of civilization to the insights and suffering of the tiny number of two-eyed people. (clip)

One of the ironies of the PARC GUI which has been… yaknow it’s two billion people and probably a million applications now have been done successfully in it… it’s actually a bicycle with training wheels on it, and nobody training wheels are on it. And the reason is that I designed that user interface for children. (clip)

So when I look at the interfaces today—what I see because I know what it was and what it could be—I see first: a bicycle with training wheels on, but people can’t see the training wheels because they don’t know it’s supposed to be a bike.

And then the second thing I see after 20-30 years of it is: a bicycle with training wheels on it, completely encrusted with jewels and rhinestones because it’s been decorated in a thousand different ways, features have been put on it, but it’s still got the f***ing training wheels on it! (clip)

There’s misconceptions in the industry about what piracy is […] From our point of view, what we saw more and more is that piracy is the result of bad service […] People are happy to pay money if they’re getting what they perceive as a great product delivered on their terms. This is an example where a lot of the copy protection schemes go in exactly the wrong direction, they’re actually negative service. (clip)

Your honor, a courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product—the truth—for all time. […] The decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this… creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom […] Are you prepared to condemn him, and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery? (clip)

It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that. I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. (clip)

Instead of using the machine to emancipate us from the organizational structures of the office, we just implemented those structures into the machine. Instead of using the screen to liberate us from the four sides of a flat sheet of paper, we just made an electronic version of paper. (clip)

Hierarchy is the official metaphysic of the computer world. Today’s hierarchical computer tools impose hierarchy where it may not exist; they can model the hierarchical aspects of the world but not the vital remainder. They teach beginners that it’s the necessary structure of computers and the universe. (clip)

The desktop was meant to ease white-collar workers into a new and unfamiliar technology, it wasn’t meant to be the pinnacle of user interaction for all time. We can do better, it just doesn’t occur to enough of us to demand better—to ask visionaries to imagine something new. (clip)