Helmut Schmidt Quotes

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.

I look at my son and his relationship to technology, and I think back to when I was six and how wildly different the world is in that regard. I see him using an iPhone and all this stuff, and then I think back to when I was six. We didn't even have computers in our houses at all yet. This is a huge gap between our experiences as children.

It's a whole new world out here. The online world is like a blackboard on which, when you write, the whole world can see - and I'm thrilled about this development. I want to make full use of it.

The world is really run by the Web. There's so much information out there that you can click and keep going down the rabbit hole finding stuff.

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

Social media has given us the world at our fingertips every morning. And we watch it change, live. In the morning, in the old days, we'd read the 'Post,' and that was what we had.

There's so much information accessible to everyone now because the Internet is so powerful; social media is so powerful.

The Web is the new book though, innit?

Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.

The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.

Ordinary Chinese are also getting unprecedented access to information. More than half a billion Chinese now use the Internet.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

I don't think parents can protect their kids in this media-nut culture.

I remember having pizza at Shakey's in Vancouver, Washington in 1973 and talking about the fact that eventually, everyone is going to be online and have access to newspapers and stuff, and wouldn't people be willing to pay for information on a computer terminal.

That's what's good about the digital revolution is it makes information asymmetry much harder to maintain.

The digital revolution has also meant a revolution in access to information. This puts more power and knowledge into the hands of nonexperts.

Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.

By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

I mean, my mom knows Google, but she doesn't know MySpace.

My generation is so tied up in television, computers, and video games. When we were born, MTV was already there. It was normal.

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.