Steven Levy Quotes

Central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.

We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.
- Urs Hölzle

You can create art and beauty with a computer.

Find a way to delight in all students. Look for the best, expect the best, and find something in each child [you] can treasure.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers
and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works
should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority
promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.

She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.

Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.

I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.

We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.

The fact that biological, or 'natural' rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.

To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.

At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for 'yes.'

Inherently, Larry & Serge aren't paper-oriented - they're product oriented. If they have another 10 minutes, they want to make something better. They don't want to take 10 minutes to tell you something they did.
- Terry Winograd

Ideas ... [are] like babies - everything about their environment [says] they shouldn't exist. But they do. You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.
(Attributed to Mike Jones)