Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society.

I don't take for granted all the blessings that I have, and as soon as I heard about Computers for Youth, I really wanted to be involved. Anyone who knows me knows how much time I spend on computers. I'm a computer addict. Every young person deserves to have a computer in his or her home.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.

In Congress, I'll work hard to encourage investment in education, particularly with respect to technology and bridging the digital divide.

Nobody expects that just because they've made computers better they're going to give them to you free.

When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work.

The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.

I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.

The ideal ratio is one computer to every five students; we are nowhere close to that percentage in a lot of schools in America.

I am of the very last generation who didn't have computers at school. As we grow old we'll become something of an aberration.

And it's here and it's ready and we can really revolutionize the way we educate our children with tablet computers, and I'm committed to doing whatever I can to speaking to whomever I can to send this signal - to pound this message home. Now is the time.

I come from Montana, and in eastern Montana we have a lot of dirt between light bulbs. It is expensive trying to bring the new technologies to smaller schools to upgrade their technologies to take advantage of distance learning.

Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.

Computer literacy is a fundamental civil right.

I think when I graduated from my high school in '84, they were just bringing computers in. I don't even know if they were for classes. They might have just been for the administration. It was nowhere on the radar for anybody that I know.

Unless we make computer science a priority, we risk making gender, class, and racial disparities worse as jobs flow to those with a computer science background.

That was something that shaped my thinking regarding Estonia: the idea that we should be getting our young people to work with computers.

If getting young people computer-literate through putting school systems online is a no-brainer, at least in retrospect, getting older people and those in rural areas online can be a tougher nut to crack.

I'm trying to get through life without really knowing about computers, but I don't know if I am going to make it.

My mom bought a computer in the '80s to do accounting, and she was so smart at computers that we spent all our time with them. My childhood was sitting on the floor of her office and figuring out how to program with my mom.

With technology, we can achieve universal access to secondary education within a generation.

College just didn't even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.

Every child in Uruguay has a little green laptop.