David Leonhardt Quotes

By the late '90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life

If you'd asked me in 1980 what the big impact of microprocessors would be, I probably would have missed the PC. If you asked me in 1990 what was important, I probably would have missed the Internet.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

In the space of one lifetime, the Internet has opened up opportunities that were previously inconceivable.

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.

We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

It would be ridiculous to ignore the speed and possibilities of the digital landscape.

I remember being given a demo of the 'World Wide Web' at Peter Gabriel's studio in the early 90s, and I had zero comprehension that I was staring into the future. I was just happy with my pager and teletext on the TV.

The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it's a new era.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

I grew up in a generation that had exponential technological advances.

I'm lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I'm grateful to be a witness to that. It's horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense?

I didn't even have a computer until like 10 years ago. I was still using a typewriter until 2002.

I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.

I think the technology today is so much more advanced that it gives kids a lot more freedom... Back then it was a lot different.

For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.