147 Quotes by Nicholas Negroponte

I grew up with free television. Now, it wasn’t free, there was these commercials, and so the economic model was driven through commercials and through advertising.

When you meet a head of state, and you say, ‘What is your most precious natural resource?’ they will not say children at first, and then when you say, ‘children,’ they will pretty quickly agree with you.

I’ve spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don’t want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things – is one of the best ways to learn.

I had come to a stage in life where I didn’t need to earn an income, I didn’t need to earn a reputation, I didn’t need fame, I didn’t need any of the things you might want in your early career.

You go to developing countries today and you’ll find automobiles that you haven’t seen since you’re childhood and that’s because they really are valuable, they’re taken care of, they’re repaired, and when something breaks, they just don’t buy a new one, they actually fix it.

I’m not against paying at all. What I’m against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it’s free, but you have to fill out this form.

Very often kids don’t ask questions in class because they don’t want to be seen asking a question.

Linux is its own worst enemy: it’s splintered, it has different distributions, it’s too complex to run for most people.