Vitalik Buterin Quotes

I would have liked to be a nerd. I didn't even make it to that.

As the daughter of two teachers with first-class degrees, I'd always seen myself as a duffer by comparison.

Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.

I was put off by people at school - my cabbage wasn't as good as other people's, you know, so that put me off.

I had a great deal of confidence when I graduated from Berkeley. I had almost none when I was at Princeton. After a while, when people tell you you can't do something because you're a woman, you begin to believe maybe they're right.

I was downright obnoxious. In second grade, we had some program where we kept a public list of all the books we read. I think it even included the number of pages. In my nerdy mind, having the longest and most impressive list was somehow going to make up for the fact that I couldn't climb a rope or do a backwards summersault in PE.

It's kind of weird, because I look at myself as just a normal person. My friends get rejected all the time, so why shouldn't I? I don't think I'm anything special.

Even a lot of kids who are gifted can be kids who feel like wimps or nerds.

I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.

I always thought I wasn't cool enough in school, I was in the 'nerd' crew. I actually enjoyed studying.

I was never good at being a boy, but I was always a good student.

I didn't finish my A-levels so there was always a part of me that wanted to be taken seriously.

For some reason as a kid being a smart athlete didn't seem like the right thing, because you didn't fit in. You didn't want to be too smart because you'd be a nerd. But then you didn't want to be too dumb either because then you didn't get the grades you needed to play.

Throughout school, I've faced ridicule and been complexed about my appearance. I almost turned into a nervous wreck. Peer pressure is bad. Children can be really cruel. Specially if you're not like everyone else.

I was a teenage girl once. I was not an overweight teenage girl, but I had really bad acne when I was 11 or 12 years old. It was heart-rending, and people made fun of me. People whispered when I walked by in the hallways, and I was sure they were whispering about me. My adult perspective is maybe they weren't.

It's so easy as a teen to feel like everybody is having this normal experience - except you. You're on the outside.

I thought my high school would either be like 'Beverly Hills 90210' or 'Stand and Deliver' - it was just a run-of-the-mill high school.

I don't want to change; I just want to be like everyone else. I'm nothing special.

I felt like I could play with anybody, but some people felt differently.

I was, like, the guy who sat at the front of the class and did his homework and did everyone else's homework and got A grades.

I was the funny one in my group; there was a lot pressure to be responsible for everyone's happiness. I didn't like watching other friends of mine be called the 'pretty one' or the 'smart one.' That had no depth, and it didn't match how I knew them.

I think I was a pretty normal kid. I wasn't the prom queen, but I wasn't a freak, either.

In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety.

I remember being in high school and this guy saying to me, 'You'd actually be good-looking if you didn't joke around so much.' That affected me, and so I stopped joking around, and I stopped being a goof because I thought people would like me better.

A girl's social networking profile is a persona she constructs, a photoshopped billboard on the information superhighway. It also offers a salve for the anxiety so many girls feel about relationships, providing the answers to burning social questions like, What do other people think of me? Do people like me? Am I normal? Am I popular? Am I cool?