Top 180 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The young are always coming up with the good ideas; it’s because they waste time. They follow their passion and do something, not looking for a payoff, just doing what’s interesting.”

— Kevin Kelly

52. “Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on.”

— Kevin Kelly

53. “We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.”

— Kevin Kelly

54. “Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.”

— Kevin Kelly

55. “While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. That’s why most of the brutal harassment on Twitter, Yik Yak, Reddit, and other sites is delivered anonymously. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.”

— Kevin Kelly

56. “My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq.”

— Kevin Kelly

57. “Our appetite for the instant is insatiable. The cost of real-time engagement requires massive coordination and degrees of collaboration that were unthinkable a few years ago.”

— Kevin Kelly

58. “If it were a nation, Facebook would be the largest country on the planet. Yet the entire economy of this largest country runs on labor that isn’t paid. A.”

— Kevin Kelly

59. “This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn’t mean we can get there from here.”

— Kevin Kelly

60. “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.”

— Kevin Kelly

61. “In a broad systems sense, an organism’s environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.”

— Kevin Kelly

62. “The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are.”

— Kevin Kelly

63. “When you keep people waiting they begin to think of all your flaws.”

— Kevin Kelly

64. “Don’t treat people as bad as they are. Treat them as good as you are.”

— Kevin Kelly

65. “As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke.”

— Kevin Kelly

66. “The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.”

— Kevin Kelly

67. “But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.”

— Kevin Kelly

68. “There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.”

— Kevin Kelly

69. “Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. Pretend.”

— Kevin Kelly

70. “Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. A.”

— Kevin Kelly

71. “The very long tail of the future is already here.”

— Kevin Kelly

72. “We are, and will remain, perpetual newbies. We.”

— Kevin Kelly

73. “Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.”

— Kevin Kelly

74. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.” Our.”

— Kevin Kelly

75. “We should really call AIs “AAs,” for “artificial aliens.” An.”

— Kevin Kelly

76. “Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” So.”

— Kevin Kelly

77. “The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.”

— Kevin Kelly

78. “This is the culmination of a lot of people’s vision. I think this is just another step towards making Central Michigan football among the elite programs in the Mid-American Conference.”

— Kevin Kelly

79. “Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.”

— Kevin Kelly

80. “The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.”

— Kevin Kelly

81. “We are particularly susceptible to bias when we are hurting or desperate. An.”

— Kevin Kelly

82. “An organization’s intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.”

— Kevin Kelly

83. “It’s more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don’t want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.”

— Kevin Kelly

84. “A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs.”

— Kevin Kelly

85. “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. You.”

— Kevin Kelly

86. “That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook’s remarkable success.”

— Kevin Kelly

87. “Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.”

— Kevin Kelly

88. “Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.”

— Kevin Kelly

89. “And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs.”

— Kevin Kelly

90. “As a tool, evolution is good for three things: How to get somewhere you want but can’t find the route to. How to get to somewhere you can’t imagine. How to open up entirely new places to get to.”

— Kevin Kelly

91. “An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.”

— Kevin Kelly

92. “Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.”

— Kevin Kelly

93. “It’s generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.”

— Kevin Kelly

94. “Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid. In.”

— Kevin Kelly

95. “A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury. In.”

— Kevin Kelly

96. “A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.”

— Kevin Kelly

97. “This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.”

— Kevin Kelly

98. “We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.”

— Kevin Kelly

99. “Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”

— Kevin Kelly

100. “You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past.”

— Kevin Kelly