Top 50 Vinton Cerf Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We live in a very complex world.”

— Vinton Cerf

2. “Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

— Vinton Cerf

3. “There’s an old maxim that says, ‘Things that work persist,’ which is why there’s still Cobol floating around.”

— Vinton Cerf

4. “Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.”

— Vinton Cerf

5. “Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.”

— Vinton Cerf

6. “The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.”

— Vinton Cerf

7. “Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people.”

— Vinton Cerf

8. “Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don’t share your ideas, smart people can’t do anything about them, and you’ll remain anonymous and powerless.”

— Vinton Cerf

9. “We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.”

— Vinton Cerf

10. “What is special about VOIP is that it’s just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing – or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax – that you can do on the public switched telephone network.”

— Vinton Cerf

11. “I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I’ve come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.”

— Vinton Cerf

12. “The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now.”

— Vinton Cerf

13. “I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future – what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.”

— Vinton Cerf

14. “The hackers don’t want to destroy the network. They want to keep it running, so they can keep making money from it.”

— Vinton Cerf

15. “In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.”

— Vinton Cerf

16. “We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.”

— Vinton Cerf

17. “At some point, you can’t lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.”

— Vinton Cerf

18. “There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.”

— Vinton Cerf

19. “The Internet lives where anyone can access it.”

— Vinton Cerf

20. “My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we’re in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration’s course ignores reality.”

— Vinton Cerf

21. “The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.”

— Vinton Cerf

22. “I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.”

— Vinton Cerf

23. “If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.”

— Vinton Cerf

24. “Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address – just one – this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.”

— Vinton Cerf

25. “The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.”

— Vinton Cerf

26. “Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.”

— Vinton Cerf

27. “I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.”

— Vinton Cerf

28. “Now, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.”

— Vinton Cerf

29. “Surf the Web is a happy coincidence.”

— Vinton Cerf

30. “On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!”

— Vinton Cerf

31. “By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.”

— Vinton Cerf

32. “In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.”

— Vinton Cerf

33. “But what we all have to learn is that we can’t do everything ourselves.”

— Vinton Cerf

34. “It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don’t like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.”

— Vinton Cerf

35. “Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.”

— Vinton Cerf

36. “First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists – once burned – are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.”

— Vinton Cerf

37. “I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.”

— Vinton Cerf

38. “Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.”

— Vinton Cerf

39. “What’s wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn’t matter what else is going on.”

— Vinton Cerf

40. “We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.”

— Vinton Cerf

41. “I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.”

— Vinton Cerf

42. “The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people – the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.”

— Vinton Cerf

43. “So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.”

— Vinton Cerf

44. “I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.”

— Vinton Cerf

45. “There’s a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.”

— Vinton Cerf

46. “I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.”

— Vinton Cerf

47. “There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.”

— Vinton Cerf

48. “Although I’ve had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.”

— Vinton Cerf

49. “I’m projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.”

— Vinton Cerf

50. “In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that’s good.”

— Vinton Cerf