Jane Smiley Quotes

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.

Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions. The search engine is one of the greatest inventions in human history.

If I look into my past, I was definitely into inventors. I was into stories of Edison and Tesla and da Vinci and all these guys making stuff in their garage.

The spinning wheel is itself an exquisite piece of machinery. My head daily bows in reverence to its unknown inventor.

I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!

I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.

Moore's law is really about economics.

Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.

This is a software-powered world.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.

It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

the science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.

The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.

Scientific discoveries and innovation come from combining different existing technologies and different perspectives in a unique way.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

Best of all, persons can sometimes be app-transcendent: making dramatic progress or discoveries, without any dependence on any app. In this context, I like to mention Steve Jobs. While he had as much to do as anyone with the invention and development of apps, he NEVER was limited by the current technology - indeed, he typically transcended it and relied on his own considerable wits.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.