Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Esther Dyson
-
“The important thing to remember is that this is not a new form of life. It is just a new activity.”
-
“The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.”
-
“A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.”
-
“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.”
-
“As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“From the business point of view — not to overstate it — intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance. The intellectual assets should be distributed for free, and then you should use them as advertising to charge for speaking, consulting, for software support—for T-shirts.”
-
“Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy. ... Number one, that it works. Number two, that it's moral. Not always, and not everybody in it is moral, but the system is, I think, a moral one.”
-
“I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.”
-
“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 think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes — I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes.”
-
“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.”
-
“I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.”
-
“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.”
-
“... 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.”
-
“In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“Listening to other companies' customers is the best way to gain market share, while listening to the visionaries is the best way to create new markets.”
-
“No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.”
-
“[On the Internet:] Its impact — the widespread availability of two-way electronic communications — will change all of our lives. It will suck power away from central governments, mass media, and big business.”
-
“Everybody should have a real failure, ideally when they are pretty young, that gives them a sense of confidence. I think that was one of Steve Jobs's problems. He was successful for way too long before it finally hit him. There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.”
-
“Genuine achievement gives you a sense that you can do stuff. And genuine failure gives you a sense that you can survive being imperfect.”
Esther Dyson, U.S. journalist, Wall Street technology analyst, philanthropist, commentator
(1951)