Top 60 Nicholas Negroponte Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

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2. “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

3. “Good education has got to be good entertainment.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

4. “It’s not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

5. “Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

6. “Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

7. “Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

8. “Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

9. “It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

10. “Computer science departments have always considered ‘user interface’ research to be sissy work.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

11. “By the year 2020 the largest employer in the developed world will be the self.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

12. “The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential – small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

13. “Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

14. “The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

15. “MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

16. “You can see the future best through peripheral vision.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

17. “Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

18. “I’ve spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don’t want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

19. “Very often kids don’t ask questions in class because they don’t want to be seen asking a question.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

20. “Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things – is one of the best ways to learn.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

21. “Scale will get you strategy.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

22. “I had come to a stage in life where I didn’t need to earn an income, I didn’t need to earn a reputation, I didn’t need fame, I didn’t need any of the things you might want in your early career.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

23. “If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

24. “While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching – but good teaching and by good teachers – a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

25. “Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

26. “In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, “One laptop per child.””

— Nicholas Negroponte

27. “Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

28. “The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

29. “This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

30. “Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

31. “What’s the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

32. “Linux is its own worst enemy: it’s splintered, it has different distributions, it’s too complex to run for most people.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

33. “My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

34. “Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

35. “It’s hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you’re going to depend on the community to make software for it.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

36. “By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

37. “Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

38. “The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among the originators of breakthrough ideas.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

39. “Young people, I happen to believe, are the world’s most precious natural resource.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

40. “When we go to school, very often, we don’t see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

41. “The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

42. “I’m not good at selling laptops. I’m good at selling ideas.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

43. “The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

44. “A Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

45. “But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

46. “To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn’t require paper.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

47. “Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

48. “If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?”

— Nicholas Negroponte

49. “Most children in the world go to schools in two shifts, there’s a morning shift and an afternoon shift.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

50. “In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it’s computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.”

— Nicholas Negroponte