Jeff Bezos Quotes

Olympic wrestling is like using an old Nokia phone; it's fairly basic.

Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.

We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.

The problem is that there are very few technologies that essentially haven't changed for 60, 70 years.

By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society.

Synergy is the VCR of media right now - discredited, outdated and left behind.

Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.

The technology is just so far gone. It's just like back in the day you needed a suitcase just to have a cell phone. The battery was so heavy, it was like carrying a gallon of soda around with you all day.

I remember that, one day, I was visiting one training center in the 1990s that was teaching people how to fix Volkswagen engines from the 1960s, which were no longer sold. So you were training people on a skill that had zero value. The reason is that they hadn't received any new equipment in 20 years.

We had Compaqs running Windows 98 or 2000. No laptops. It was like we had gone back in time.

People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.

My life's goal is to get rid of computers and invent everything that removes its necessity.

Now AOL is the grandma of online Web services. I mean, we don't need it anymore.

And because technology is moving so rapidly, things become obsolete very, very quickly. In 15 years time, Will Caster is probably going to be in some weird room in Vegas where people are plugging quarters into him. Who has a mini-disc of a laser disc player? It's over!

What are the most brilliant of our chymical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?

I did a club one night - the speakers were old as hell. My jokes were coming out in black and white.

Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we're doing.

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment.

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

Newspapers are technologically obsolete. In the days of instant electronic communications, its crazy to have to print these newspapers at a central plant and deliver them by truck. They're the biggest problem with our solid-waste disposal. And the news you get is a day old. You can get it off the Internet instantaneously for a fraction of the cost.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.

Look at the 18th century. There was a lot more freedom going on.