Quotations about the Internet
Quotations 1
This is a compilation of quotations, attributed
where known. They are in no particular order.
If you come across attributed
quotations not included here please send them to me
with details of the source.
…if I look at my 16
year old daughter, for her bandwidth is a big issue because one of her
main aims in life is to steal intellectual property from other people.
Simon Willis, Director, Internet Business
Solutions Group, Cisco Systems
Evidence to Trade & Industry Committee,
House of Commons Oct 2004
If you don't see the Internet
as an opportunity, it will become a threat. In two or three year's time, the
Internet will become as commonplace in the office as the telephone.
Tony Blair Sept 1999
The Web is trivially simple -
massively successful and its like Karaoke - anybody can do it.
Ted Nelson, Computer Visionary & Founder of Hyper Text
The Internet is about the
free exchange and sale of other people's ideas.
Futurama cartoon
2
Nobody "owns" the
Internet…
Everybody owns their piece of the Internet.
The new electronic
independence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
The internet is a waste of
time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
William Gibson
I love the Internet because
that is truly a way to make money while you're sleeping.
Sandra Bate, Bates International Motor Home Rental Systems,
Inc
The internet is the trailer
park for the soul.
Marilyn Manson
Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears.
Content is king.
Bill Gates 1996
3
Content is King
But
Linking is Queen.
The newest computer can merely
compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human
beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old
problem, of what to say and how to say it.
Bill
Gates
The "fast as light" pace of
the Internet can kill or establish an idea quicker than a marketing department
can come up with an ad campaign.
Wiring the
World
The Internet isn't free. It
just has an economy that makes no sense to capitalism.
Brad Shapcott
One of the problems with the
Internet, I've discovered that people don't understand it. The Internet is an
open sewer, it's untreated, unfiltered information. But because it comes with
this technological package, I read it on the Internet, you know, it's
science.
Thomas Friedman, The New York
4
The electronic town hall
allows for speedy communications and bad decision-making.
David Shenk
Basically, our goal is to
organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and
useful.
Larry Page, Co-founder Google
If we truly understand that
the internet is shit then maybe we'll go back to looking elsewhere to check our
information instead of just Google.
www.internetisshit.org
My favourite thing about the
Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without
having to smell them.
Penn Jillett
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
On the Internet, nobody knows
you're a dog.
Peter Steiner, New Yorker
5
Because the Internet has an
aura of "technology" surrounding it, the uneducated believe information from it
even more.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times
Worldwide Internet Population
2004 - 934 million
Computer Industry
Almanac
A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click
Information and images bump
against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this
interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
Marshall McLuhan
Surfing on the Internet is like sex - everyone boasts about doing more than they actually do. But in the case of the Internet, it is a lot more.
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
6
The Internet is like a large jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You have to go through it.
Scale-free topology is resistant to random failures - one reason the Internet, despite the lack of artifice in its design, has proved so reliable.
Oh, what a tangled website we weave, when first we practice.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it
The net's a cross between an elephant and a white elephant sale. It never forgets, and it's always crap.
The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little.
Look, the Internet is basically a tool for buying things and for pornography. When it becomes more than that, it will become extremely dangerous.
7
The Semantic Web is not a
separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given
well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in
cooperation.
Tim Berners-Lee
And bring me a hard copy of
the Internet so I can do some serious surfing.
Scott Adams - Dilbert
Of course, the best way to
get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for
corrections.
Matthew Austern
Ok, I understand what virtual reality is, but can someone explain to me what is reality
The Internet, of course, is
more than a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Time Magazine
Some jerk infected the
Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous
people are.
Kurt Vonnegut
8
At some point... we must have faith in the intelligence of the end user.
The Internet is a shallow and
unreliable electronic repository of dirty pictures, inaccurate rumours, bad
spelling and worse grammar, inhabited largely by people with no demonstrable
social skills.
Chronicle of Higher Education
April 1997
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.
The Internet is a giant
international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I
mean, people without lives.
Dave Barry, Miami
Herald
The Internet is the first
thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest
experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
If you leave this web site, I
will kill this defenseless toilet.
Homepage -
the unofficial Dave Barry website
9
Personal Web pages are the
'90s equivalent of home video, except that you don't have to visit someone
else's house to fall asleep - you can do so in the comfort of your own home.
Ray Valdes
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
Oh, they have the internet on
computers now.
Homer Simpson
Personalization: the
automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them so
that we can feel that somewhere there's a piece of software that loves us for
who we are.
David Weinberger, JOHO
Whatever the long-range value
of the Net turns out to be, it won't be the quality of information it offers,
the democratic distance learning it makes possible, the presence of the Net
user to all of reality, and the possibility of a new life full of meaning.
Hubert Dreyfus, Philosopher University of
California
10
Quotations about the Internet - 10
The net, by its very nature,
is inclusive. It reduces the barriers to human interaction.
Institute for Public Policy Research
…All they have to do is
implement the standards.
Jeffrey Zelman on
Internet Explorer 5.5, April 2000
log file analysis is perhaps
best viewed as an art disguised as a science
Susan Haigh and Janette Megarity
…All they have to do is
implement the standards.
Jeffrey Zelman on
Internet Explorer 5.5, April 2000
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from email…. Amen
11
When I took office, only high
energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now
even my cat has its own page.
Bill
Clinton
If you tried to read every document on the web, then for each day's effort you would be a year further behind in your goal.
Like with drugs, you have to teach your kids about the Internet and possible dangers.
You can't take something off the Internet - it's like taking pee out of a pool.
Ever since there has been
more than one browser, things have been a mess.
Jeffrey Veen
Hayley Cropper: There's a lot
more than porn on the internet.
Janice
Battersby: That's news to me.
Coronation
Street, ITV Soap, 16 May 2005