118 Quotes by Alan Kay

"The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here."

"All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper."

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

"There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating."

"I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."

"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."

"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited."

"Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others."

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."