Top 100 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

2. “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

3. “You affect the world by what you browse.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

4. “The Semantic Web isn’t inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It’s just about the relationships between things.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

5. “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

6. “Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

7. “To be a hacker – when I use the term – is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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8. “There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

9. “The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

10. “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

11. “The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

12. “Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

13. “Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

14. “Acceptance is the spiritual hammock.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

15. “AI is not just heading for our industry, it will radically change the machinery we use in marketing.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

16. “Things can change so fast on the internet.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

17. “I think in general it’s clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings, and the Web’s a form of communications, so it generally should be good.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

18. “You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

19. “The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

20. “I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

21. “Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

22. “Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

23. “The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world. We clump into family, association, and companies.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

24. “Celebrity damages private life.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

25. “When it comes to professionalism, it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. Standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

26. “The concept of the Web is of universal readership.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

27. “We can’t blame the technology when we make mistakes.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

28. “The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

29. “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

30. “Cool URIs don’t change.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

31. “It’s time to recognise the Internet as a basic human right, that means guaranteeing affordable access for all, ensuring Internet packets are delivered without commercial or political discrimination, and protecting the privacy and freedom of Web users regardless of where they live.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

32. “I invented the Web just because I needed it, really, because it was so frustrating that it didn’t exit.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

33. “Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

34. “E-mail is interesting. We can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

35. “It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

36. “If different cultures connect with each other, they are less likely to want to shoot each other.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

37. “The Mobile Web Initiative is important – information must be made seamlessly available on any device.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

38. “I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

39. “I don’t believe in the sort of “Eureka!” moment idea. I think it’s a myth. I’m very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

40. “The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that’s put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

41. “Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

42. “When I invented the web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

43. “Anyone who slaps a “this page is best viewed with Browser X” label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

44. “Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

45. “It’s mine – you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

46. “The world’s urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

47. “The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I’ll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you’re not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

48. “What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

49. “The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

50. “I don’t know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people’s websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.”

— Tim Berners-Lee