Top 120 Steven Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.”

— Steven Johnson

52. “This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.”

— Steven Johnson

53. “If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages. Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today’s illuminated wonderland. That something was the electric lightbulb.”

— Steven Johnson

54. “That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.”

— Steven Johnson

55. “They mistook the smoke for the fire.”

— Steven Johnson

56. “Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So.”

— Steven Johnson

57. “If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.”

— Steven Johnson

58. “Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.”

— Steven Johnson

59. “In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.”

— Steven Johnson

60. “The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.”

— Steven Johnson

61. “If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”

— Steven Johnson

62. “Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon. This.”

— Steven Johnson

63. “This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.”

— Steven Johnson

64. “The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.”

— Steven Johnson

65. “Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.”

— Steven Johnson

66. “Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged “structural holes” between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions.”

— Steven Johnson

67. “When it’s a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you’re riffing off other people’s ideas, that actually can be productive.”

— Steven Johnson

68. “Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.”

— Steven Johnson

69. “Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.”

— Steven Johnson

70. “Build a tangled bank.”

— Steven Johnson

71. “Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.”

— Steven Johnson

72. “It may not be possible to ‘win the future,’ in President Obama’s words, but if we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.”

— Steven Johnson

73. “That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.”

— Steven Johnson

74. “Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.”

— Steven Johnson

75. “You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn’t always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred – or a thousand – years later.”

— Steven Johnson

76. “The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”

— Steven Johnson

77. “Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.”

— Steven Johnson

78. “This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”

— Steven Johnson

79. “The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there’s more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.”

— Steven Johnson

80. “The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.”

— Steven Johnson

81. “The FBI’s information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from other members of the organization, a legacy of an institution predicated on secrets and “need to know” restrictions.”

— Steven Johnson

82. “It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.”

— Steven Johnson

83. “But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.”

— Steven Johnson

84. “The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice’s lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans’ lead – at least so far – and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.”

— Steven Johnson

85. “We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad – amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.”

— Steven Johnson

86. “No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet’s egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the Internet itself. For them, the Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn’t the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem. One.”

— Steven Johnson

87. “Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.”

— Steven Johnson

88. “A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer’s knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.”

— Steven Johnson

89. “Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.”

— Steven Johnson

90. “Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.”

— Steven Johnson

91. “His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.”

— Steven Johnson

92. “So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.”

— Steven Johnson

93. “The time travelers are usually adapt at “intercrossing” different fields of expertise. That’s the beauty of the hobbyist: it’s generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.”

— Steven Johnson

94. “It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.”

— Steven Johnson

95. “That’s the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.”

— Steven Johnson

96. “Like any other thought, a hunch is simply a network of cells firing inside your brain in an organized pattern. But for that hunch to blossom into something more substantial, it has to connect with other ideas. The hunch requires an environment where surprising new connections can be forged: the neurons and synapses of the brain itself, and the larger cultural environment that the brain occupies.”

— Steven Johnson

97. “I love those stretches where I’ve just been a writer – when I haven’t been doing Internet start-ups – where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.”

— Steven Johnson

98. “Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.”

— Steven Johnson

99. “As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.”

— Steven Johnson

100. “The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”:.”

— Steven Johnson