Top 35 Joichi Ito Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself. Focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware and super present.”

— Joichi Ito

Featured in: Encouraging Quotes for Students

2. “Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.”

— Joichi Ito

3. “If we destroy human rights and rule of law in response to terrorism, they have won.”

— Joichi Ito

4. “Education is something that other people do to you. Learning is something you do for yourself.”

— Joichi Ito

5. “Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.”

— Joichi Ito

6. “Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.”

— Joichi Ito

7. “There’s a new power of pull. Pulling resources from the network JUST when you need them.”

— Joichi Ito

8. “In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it’s the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up.”

— Joichi Ito

9. “My whole life has been about connecting things that aren’t connected.”

— Joichi Ito

10. “When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.”

— Joichi Ito

11. “The idea of trying to fight against extremism was written off as naive.”

— Joichi Ito

12. “It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism.”

— Joichi Ito

13. “LinkedIn allows you to search histories and CVs in your network – it’s great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who have worked with someone you know. It’s also an interesting way to find references for people or companies you’re getting to know.”

— Joichi Ito

14. “Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school – to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.”

— Joichi Ito

15. “The US constitution’s First Amendment rights only cover Americans, but I believe that in a democracy the competition of ideas and free speech should combat beliefs that it does not agree with – more speech and debate, not censorship.”

— Joichi Ito

16. “I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.”

— Joichi Ito

17. “Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential.”

— Joichi Ito

18. “We have a long way to go before we are able to hear the voices of everyone on earth, but I believe that providing voices and building bridges is essential for the World Peace we all wish for.”

— Joichi Ito

19. “The cost of assessing risk is now often greater than the cost of failing.”

— Joichi Ito

20. “Now that our media companies and it appears are policies are traded for cash, what is there to check the continuing consolidation of power and diminishing of democracy?”

— Joichi Ito

21. “We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.”

— Joichi Ito

22. “I just believe that the cost of marketing is going to increase and the cost of delivery is going to decrease as the Net gets stronger and mass media gets weaker.”

— Joichi Ito

23. “I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.”

— Joichi Ito

24. “Money creates a power relationship between the payer and the payee.”

— Joichi Ito

25. “I definitely feel like my blog is going edgy to broad and boring.”

— Joichi Ito

26. “Internet penetration in Italy is quite low and the Berlusconi media machine controls most of what people see.”

— Joichi Ito

27. “If the cost of figuring out whether to do something is more than just doing it, then just do it!”

— Joichi Ito

28. “For some reason, I grew up generally believing that Japan and Korea were quite friendly. I do know that there is some bad history and the extremists on both sides are unreasonable.”

— Joichi Ito

29. “I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog.”

— Joichi Ito

30. “The most important thing I learned in school was how to touch type.”

— Joichi Ito

31. “In the old days, you became an adult when suddenly your life went from learning to doing the same thing for the rest of your life, but today you can’t afford to do that.”

— Joichi Ito

32. “I don’t like the word ‘futurists.’ I think we should be ‘nowists.’”

— Joichi Ito

33. “I have had a great deal of interaction with Koreans and feel a fairly strong bond with Korea.”

— Joichi Ito

Featured in: Strong Quotes

34. “Google is in an amazing position to be the target of tons of lawsuits that will set precedent for many important things for us on the Internet.”

— Joichi Ito

35. “I talked about the barriers created by monopolies. I said that it was the role of government to break up these monopolies and that we couldn’t do it alone.”

— Joichi Ito