Top 200 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.”

— Kevin Kelly

152. “Communities saturated with anonymity will either self-destruct or shift from the purely anonymous to the pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind a persistent invented nickname.”

— Kevin Kelly

153. “What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness. As AIs develop, we might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them. Our most premium AI services will likely be advertised as consciousness-free. Nonhuman.”

— Kevin Kelly

154. “The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen.”

— Kevin Kelly

155. “If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today. For.”

— Kevin Kelly

156. “In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant – it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.”

— Kevin Kelly

157. “The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.”

— Kevin Kelly

158. “It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five.”

— Kevin Kelly

159. “We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia – highlights, notes, questions, musings. The.”

— Kevin Kelly

160. “Consumers say they don’t want to be tracked, but in fact they keep feeding the machine with their data, because they want to claim their benefits. This.”

— Kevin Kelly

161. “Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified. The.”

— Kevin Kelly

162. “Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.”

— Kevin Kelly

163. “But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.”

— Kevin Kelly

164. “You could, if so inclined, read more Greek texts in the original Greek than the most prestigious Greek nobleman of classical times.”

— Kevin Kelly

165. “The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.”

— Kevin Kelly

166. “The end is almost always the beginning of something better.”

— Kevin Kelly

167. “Right now no matter your age these are your golden years. The good stuff will yield golden memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons.”

— Kevin Kelly

168. “Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented.”

— Kevin Kelly

169. “The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data.”

— Kevin Kelly

170. “The web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about a hundred billion neurons. Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links – but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is.”

— Kevin Kelly

171. “Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.”

— Kevin Kelly

172. “Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keeping a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I.”

— Kevin Kelly

173. “There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer.”

— Kevin Kelly

174. “These forces are trajectories, not destinies.”

— Kevin Kelly

175. “Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership. Clouds.”

— Kevin Kelly

176. “Well, here’s what you can do, and that’s about it.”

— Kevin Kelly

177. “Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.”

— Kevin Kelly

178. “Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful to them. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.”

— Kevin Kelly

179. “Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outperformed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer involvement is a surprise.”

— Kevin Kelly

180. “Embrace pronoia which is the opposite of paranoia. Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.”

— Kevin Kelly

181. “The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.”

— Kevin Kelly

182. “The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication.”

— Kevin Kelly

183. “Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless.”

— Kevin Kelly

184. “Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with.”

— Kevin Kelly

185. “Every year I own less of what I use. Possession.”

— Kevin Kelly

186. “Death is the only teacher in evolution.”

— Kevin Kelly

187. “The real test of your character is not how much you deal with adversity – although that will teach you much. The real test is how you deal with power. The only cure for power is humility and the admission that your power comes from luck. The small person believes they are superior; the superior person knows they are lucky.”

— Kevin Kelly

188. “Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book.”

— Kevin Kelly

189. “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”

— Kevin Kelly

190. “It’s about how to deal with the idea killer in your own head, the part of your brain where fear and knowledge keep you from executing the brilliant ideas your mind generates every day.”

— Kevin Kelly

191. “In the Network Era – that age we have just entered – dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.”

— Kevin Kelly

192. “The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.”

— Kevin Kelly

193. “The greatest social consequence of the Darwinian revolution was the grudging acceptance by humans that humans were random descendants of monkeys, neither perfect nor engineered. The greatest social consequence of neo-biological civilization will be the grudging acceptance by humans that humans are the random ancestors of machines, and that as machines we can be engineered ourselves.”

— Kevin Kelly

194. “Pros make as many mistakes as amateurs; they’ve just learned how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.”

— Kevin Kelly

195. “Shorten your to-do list by asking yourself “What is the worst that will happen if this does not get done?” Eliminate all but the disasters.”

— Kevin Kelly

196. “The best way to advise young people is to find out what they really want to do and then advise them to do it.”

— Kevin Kelly

197. “Compliment people behind their back. It’ll come back to you.”

— Kevin Kelly

198. “Instead of asking your child what they learned today, ask them who they helped today.”

— Kevin Kelly

199. “See that old person taking forever in line? That is the future you. Have patience.”

— Kevin Kelly

200. “You can reduce the annoyance of someone’s stupid belief by increasing your understanding of why they believe it.”

— Kevin Kelly