Top 35 Esther Dyson Quotes

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don’t expect the world that we’re familiar with to be perfect.

Normal people with normal lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just take the stuff with sugar in it.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

The best entrepreneurs have a sense of purpose that drives them.

There’s almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you’re at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it’s the system – there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it’s a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

Anyone will tell you if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns. It’s in your best interest.

Change means that what was before wasn’t perfect. People want things to be better.

Don’t leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you’re doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don’t think about technology first.

The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane – those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don’t get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers‘ rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody – government stay away.

What I’m thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson‘s saying that he’d rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

I’m cheap, and so I don’t like wasting.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that’s personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

I’ve seen disgusting excess in business, and I’ve seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I’ve certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can’t ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there – there’s a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there’s too much information.

A worker‘s paradise is a consumer‘s hell.

You should not want to be a politician because you want to be president. You should be a politician because you want to fix the world or represent a movement.

Summer is conference season – a critical time for building brands, making connections, and shaping industries.

Since I became chairman, I’ve tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

The challenge of email is that people send you stuff for free, and it becomes items on your to-do list.

Doing something totally new is tricky. If you are second – and if you are smart – you can learn from the first person’s mistakes.

My ambition is to figure out how to help people create their own health and how to turn that into a profitable business.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works – I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

I have a short attention span. I couldn’t stay doing the same thing for 30 years.

It offends me when people do useless work.

From the business point of view – not to overstate it – intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

And the Russians certainly don’t have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she‘s a crook. And that’s me, the nice American. The assumption that you can’t make money honestly is a killer.

I became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter ‘Release 1.0,’ which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

The challenge of ensuring adequate, nutrient-rich food for an expanding global population is a daunting one, especially given constraints on key resources like water and agricultural land.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can’t jump on the Internet to freedom.