Top 120 Steven Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Chance favors the connected mind.”

— Steven Johnson

2. “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

— Steven Johnson

3. “If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”

— Steven Johnson

4. “Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.”

— Steven Johnson

5. “When you don’t have to ask for permission innovation thrives.”

— Steven Johnson

6. “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

— Steven Johnson

7. “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons – thousands of them – fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.”

— Steven Johnson

8. “Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.”

— Steven Johnson

9. “Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.”

— Steven Johnson

10. “If you look at where innovation – defined as ideas, not as commercial product – tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.”

— Steven Johnson

11. “Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities – a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity – but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.”

— Steven Johnson

12. “What I’m saying is individuals have better ideas if they’re connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It’s not that the network is smart.”

— Steven Johnson

13. “There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.”

— Steven Johnson

14. “The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.”

— Steven Johnson

15. “This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.”

— Steven Johnson

16. “The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.”

— Steven Johnson

17. “As Lynn Margulis writes: “All the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.”

— Steven Johnson

18. “Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.”

— Steven Johnson

19. “New ideas need old buildings.”

— Steven Johnson

20. “Look to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise: Which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provides her meat in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest. – PROVERBS 6:6–8.”

— Steven Johnson

21. “Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.”

— Steven Johnson

22. “The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.”

— Steven Johnson

23. “Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells.”

— Steven Johnson

24. “An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.”

— Steven Johnson

25. “In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.”

— Steven Johnson

26. “How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.”

— Steven Johnson

27. “In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn’t have a command hierarchy. It doesn’t have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.”

— Steven Johnson

28. “And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late – because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”

— Steven Johnson

29. “Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.”

— Steven Johnson

30. “Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security.”

— Steven Johnson

31. “DR. JOHN SNOW – This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreciated by the profession.”

— Steven Johnson

32. “We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”

— Steven Johnson

33. “The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.”

— Steven Johnson

34. “Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.”

— Steven Johnson

35. “From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.”

— Steven Johnson

36. “But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren’t storming the gates.”

— Steven Johnson

37. “You and I may not live to see the day,” Snow explained to the young curate, “and my name may be forgotten when it comes; but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past; and it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear.”

— Steven Johnson

38. “Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.”

— Steven Johnson

39. “One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.”

— Steven Johnson

40. “Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.”

— Steven Johnson

41. “Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.”

— Steven Johnson

42. “One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, “Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!”

— Steven Johnson

43. “The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline – the sociology of error.”

— Steven Johnson

44. “Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.”

— Steven Johnson

45. “A metropolis shares one key characteristic with the Web: both environments are dense, liquid networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths. Those interconnections nurture great ideas, because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation. Genuine insights are hard to come by;.”

— Steven Johnson

46. “Right now we’re in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we’re operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.”

— Steven Johnson

47. “A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities – capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group.”

— Steven Johnson

48. “We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus.”

— Steven Johnson

49. “All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste.”

— Steven Johnson

50. “Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.”

— Steven Johnson