Martin Cooper Quotes

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

The most important impact on society and the world is the cell phone. Cell phones have actually been one of the primary drivers in productivity improvements.

I do love to walk around in New York because people will notice me, smile, but they never bother anyone. New Yorkers are very cool. I love New York.

But there is something very nice about coming to New York and how everyone smiles - even if they don't mean it. When I go back home to London and say hello to people, they look at me like I'm crazy.

I suddenly realized I was getting ten opening notes a day on my mobile phone, more than when I was in New York. But this is China, where nothing is surprising.

You have to take into account it was the cell phone that became what the modern-day concept of a phone call is, and this is a device that's attached to your hip 24/7. Before that there was 'leave a message' and before that there was 'hopefully you're home.'

I love the honesty of New Yorkers. When a New Yorker says 'let's do lunch,' they actually mean it. In L.A., when they say 'let's do lunch,' they're just trying to say good-bye.

People are friendlier in New York than London.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

I don't think I've ever seen a person having a serious conversation on a cellphone. It's like a kiddie thing, a complete time waster.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers' conversation, think it's nice to pretend they didn't hear. But many New Yorkers think it's nice to toss in a relevant comment.

It doesn't take a cell phone to make a person rude. There are rude people all over the place. But people are learning. I have never heard a cell phone ring in the movies. We are going to learn how to live with the advantages of new technology.

In London, people don't make eye contact; it's almost too provocative.

We predicted the concept of a telephone that isn't tied to a wall or a desk. We anticipated that everyone would have a cell phone. We joked that when you're born you would be assigned a cell phone and if you didn't answer you had died.

The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.

The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it's a new era.

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life.

And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.

Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.

Remember in the forms of speech comes change Within a thousand years, and words that then Were well esteemed, seem foolish now and strange; And yet they spake them so, time and again, And thrived in love as well as any men; And so to win their loves in sundry days, In sundry lands there are as many ways.

Avoid banquets which are given by strangers an ignorant persons. But if there is ever occasion to join them, let your attention be carefully fixed, that you slip not into the manner of the vulgar (the uninstructed).

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

Modernity is not about dress codes.