Steven Johnson Quotes

Universities are in a position where they can think very creatively.

Universities which deliver high quality research and innovation will be an essential part of that future.

If you look at America, one of the great strengths of America is its university towns and the way a lot of their businesses and a lot of their innovation and enormous economic growth have come from reducing that gap, getting those universities directly involved in start-up businesses, green field businesses, new development businesses.

Great research universities around the world are visible not just through their quality graduates but as knowledge creators and technology developers.

So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India.

The role of the federal government is to make sure enough research dollars flow into … universities to help create the ideas that 10 or 15 years from today will be exciting products.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

We have therefore decided that in the most pleasant city of Naples there should be teaching of the arts and of all disciplines, so that those who are starved for knowledge will find it in our own kingdom, and will not be forced, in their search for knowledge, to become pilgrims and to beg in foreign lands

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

The importance which I have attached to the establishment of a university within this District on a scale and for objects worthy of the American nation induces me to renew my recommendation of it to the favorable consideration of Congress.

… in the quality and range of women’s higher education, retrograde Tsarist Russia had no peer in Europe, and was second only to the U. S. A. Russian wives could own property, while in ‘advanced’ Victorian Britain, they were entirely propertyless…. The University of Calcutta gave degrees to women in 1883, decades before Oxford and Cambridge.

Universities are like a utopia in a way, because you're mentally stimulated, you're challenged, and you have a lot of young, creative minds wanting to do new things, different things. Better things.

From the first time that I went over to China, I think I was around the age of 17, 18, and just going there and seeing that their technology being years ahead of ours in America, it sparked something with me back then.

Boston had the first public library, Liverpool had the first lending library. Both cities have pioneered medical advancements during the decades and both have the largest economic powers in the world exactly 213 miles to the south by car.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, identifying treatments to diseases like cancer, and harnessing the power of robotics and artificial intelligence to support everyday tasks are all within our grasp. The first country that gives birth to these discoveries will change life as we know it.

Sciences evolve.

When I travel, I connect with creative people in all different fields and disciplines. It's sort of just to keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on. I think that's important.

If we are serious about Global Britain, we must recognise that international students bring huge benefits to our universities, our local economies and our soft power.