Top 180 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it’s profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.”

— Kevin Kelly

152. “Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.”

— Kevin Kelly

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

156. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

158. “Editorship and expertise are like vitamins for the food. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body. Too much will be toxic, or just flushed away. The.”

— Kevin Kelly

159. “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

160. “Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of – stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper – won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What.”

— Kevin Kelly

161. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

173. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

177. “Metadata is the new wealth.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

179. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

187. “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

188. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

196. “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness is wanting what you already have.”

— Kevin Kelly