147 Quotes by Nicholas Negroponte

What’s the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.

It’s hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you’re going to depend on the community to make software for it.

When we go to school, very often, we don’t see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it’s computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, “One laptop per child.”

I’m not good at selling laptops. I’m good at selling ideas.

There is a belief that children drop out of school because they’re needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that’s not really true.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn’t require paper.