Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.

You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people.

I didn't go for the needle at all. I never cared for drugs, because I saw what they did to most people. I thought that was the end of the road.

My brand of leadership, which is very focused on bringing people together, solving problems - it's what I have always tried to do - just had a hard time being as powerfully compelling in the campaign as I think it has been in previous years for other candidates.

Sometimes too much tolerance can kill you. If you are tolerant of people poisoning themselves to death they will drag you down. They will ruin your life by being intentional obstacles to your dreams.

The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it's a valid thing. It's a valid forum and I'm not going say that they aren't valid feelings. But it's sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it's sad that it's used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity.

Be careful about gossiping because loose lips really do sink ships. Now that I'm in the broadcast business, and people talk about me, I know what it feels like to be the victim of gossip.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.

'Indifference to evil is equal to evil' because it strengthens people.

The internet tends to make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

After you have 250,000 people watching your stuff every day, obviously you're going to have a few people who are going to get a little bit obsessed with your content. But I've never experienced it in a negative way. Perhaps that's because I'm lucky. I guess for some people, they experience it in a negative way and that's how the movie portrayed it.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.

Well, well, well," I said. "If it isn't the people responsible for unleashing Rose Hathaway on the world. You've got a lot to answer for.

I think it's obvious why someone wouldn't personally want to see these words on their feed, but I'm also concerned about the overall negative environment created when the comment section becomes a battleground for people to bully each other. I signed up for this.

I want to try to counter what Donald Trump says because a lot of it is mean-spirited and would hurt people.

No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

I don't think there's a problem. First of all, I don't think music turns people into social liabilities. Because you hear a lyric

People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

Gossip harms relationships and that's why it's bad. While we all do it at times, there's a point where it crosses the line and becomes bullying if it damages friendships and causes people to dislike someone.