Quote collection
48 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go."
"The point is that these decisions they've made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field."
"The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there's a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever."
"So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?"
"Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that."
"So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened."
"In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking."
"Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything."
"Telling computer guys that they need to have permission to quote things is like having to tell little children about Death."
"They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind."
"The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'."
"Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
"We live in media, as fish live in water."
"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
"Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong."
"The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world."
"Right now you are a prisoner of each application you use. You have only the options that were given you by the developer of that application."
"But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded."
"How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead."
"I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything."