Top 40 Ted Nelson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Any fool can use a computer. Many do.”

— Ted Nelson

2. “Making things easy is hard.”

— Ted Nelson

3. “The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.”

— Ted Nelson

4. “The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.”

— Ted Nelson

5. “The purpose of computers is human freedom.”

— Ted Nelson

6. “Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

— Ted Nelson

7. “Everything is deeply intertwingled.”

— Ted Nelson

8. “A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.”

— Ted Nelson

9. “The objective of hypertext research is to save the planet.”

— Ted Nelson

10. “So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.”

— Ted Nelson

11. “Right now you are a prisoner of each application you use. You have only the options that were given you by the developer of that application.”

— Ted Nelson

12. “You can and must understand computers NOW.”

— Ted Nelson

13. “The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT – ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.”

— Ted Nelson

14. “I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ – it sounds so objective and inexorable – when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.”

— Ted Nelson

15. “How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead.”

— Ted Nelson

16. “The Web is trivially simple – massively successful and its like Karaoke – anybody can do it.”

— Ted Nelson

17. “The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there’s a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.”

— Ted Nelson

18. “Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death.”

— Ted Nelson

19. “Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.”

— Ted Nelson

20. “What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes.”

— Ted Nelson

21. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.”

— Ted Nelson

22. “Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged – people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.”

— Ted Nelson

23. “We live in media, as fish live in water.”

— Ted Nelson

24. “Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder – we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.”

— Ted Nelson

25. “Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”

— Ted Nelson

26. “Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry.”

— Ted Nelson

27. “Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.”

— Ted Nelson

28. “They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.”

— Ted Nelson

29. “So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.”

— Ted Nelson

30. “The point is that these decisions they’ve made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field.”

— Ted Nelson

31. “The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions – everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.”

— Ted Nelson

32. “But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in – make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.”

— Ted Nelson

33. “If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.”

— Ted Nelson

34. “So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.”

— Ted Nelson

35. “In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.”

— Ted Nelson

36. “So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?”

— Ted Nelson

37. “So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.”

— Ted Nelson

38. “I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.”

— Ted Nelson

39. “I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.”

— Ted Nelson

40. “I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.”

— Ted Nelson