Top 180 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Willingness to learn is important, but willingness to act on what you learn is critical.”

— Kevin Kelly

2. “A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.”

— Kevin Kelly

3. “The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.”

— Kevin Kelly

4. “Nobody is as smart as everybody.”

— Kevin Kelly

5. “It is easy to make a dollar but it is hard to make a difference.”

— Kevin Kelly

6. “The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”

— Kevin Kelly

7. “A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.”

— Kevin Kelly

8. “We have to get better at believing the impossible.”

— Kevin Kelly

9. “In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.”

— Kevin Kelly

10. “Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.”

— Kevin Kelly

11. “Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.”

— Kevin Kelly

12. “The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.”

— Kevin Kelly

13. “Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.”

— Kevin Kelly

14. “How do entrepreneurs survive their early failures? They don’t view their failures as failures – they view these experiences as feedback, and a prelude to future success.”

— Kevin Kelly

15. “Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.”

— Kevin Kelly

16. “Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be.”

— Kevin Kelly

17. “Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.”

— Kevin Kelly

18. “If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers.”

— Kevin Kelly

19. “Managing bottom-up change is its own art.”

— Kevin Kelly

20. “Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it’s bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.”

— Kevin Kelly

21. “Don’t be the best. Be the only.”

— Kevin Kelly

22. “Most new ideas and new inventions are disjointed ideas merged.”

— Kevin Kelly

23. “Singularity is the point at which “all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes.””

— Kevin Kelly

24. “Answers become cheap and questions become valuable – the inverse of the situation now.”

— Kevin Kelly

25. “Technology is anything that doesn’t work yet.”

— Kevin Kelly

26. “Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay.”

— Kevin Kelly

27. “One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.”

— Kevin Kelly

28. “I work in a “you scratch my back, and I’ll stab yours” kind of a place.”

— Kevin Kelly

29. “As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke. A couple of high-profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living selling instruction and paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free. The lines of free code become valuable to you only through support and guidance. A lot of medical and genetic information will go this route in the coming decades. Right now getting a full copy of all your DNA is.”

— Kevin Kelly

30. “The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.”

— Kevin Kelly

31. “It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.”

— Kevin Kelly

32. “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Unwavering honesty will help seal in trust.”

— Kevin Kelly

33. “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines.”

— Kevin Kelly

34. “The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We.”

— Kevin Kelly

35. “Softball isn’t just a game it’s away of life.”

— Kevin Kelly

36. “No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie – the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of “becoming,” everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.”

— Kevin Kelly

37. “An organization’s reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.”

— Kevin Kelly

38. “In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it. An.”

— Kevin Kelly

39. “A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us. There’s.”

— Kevin Kelly

40. “We’re just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There’s a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.’”

— Kevin Kelly

41. “Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y’s who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously.”

— Kevin Kelly

42. “Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one’s investment.”

— Kevin Kelly

43. “When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance.”

— Kevin Kelly

44. “Evolution doesn’t care about what makes sense; it cares about what works.”

— Kevin Kelly

45. “A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.”

— Kevin Kelly

46. “The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences – which cannot be copied. Everything.”

— Kevin Kelly

47. “As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing.”

— Kevin Kelly

48. “Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.”

— Kevin Kelly

49. “The Internet will be the CB radio of the ’90s,” he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC’s argument for ignoring the new medium: “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”

— Kevin Kelly

50. “The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.”

— Kevin Kelly