Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

I understand and accept criticisms of my work, provided they are done with professional criteria and arguments.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

No organization, whether it's police or physicians or whatever, wants to have its errors held up to the light of day, but it's wrong, as is coming out so well.

It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.

They simply don't know that much about what they're doing. There isn't enough control. There isn't enough capability in ordinary people to tinker with such a complicated piece of machinery.

I've acted professionally since I was 16.

Health care organizations don't ask us to interface to every type of module because they understand that it could cause safety problems.

Standards violated are better than no standards at all.

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

I'm very professional. I always want to do the best job that I can.

In any technology, one has to be very careful to ensure that it is good and has enough safeguards.

I've seen such great material, and now I'm more picky with the type of jobs that I take because it's gotta be there. There's an old theater saying: 'If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage'... You gotta have some type of standards as far as the jobs that you take and the roles that you take on.

I want to find the right projects. I'm not going to take just anything.

Neil and I share a desire for great quality in our work. If we are offered projects, look at projects, or consider projects that don't have that quality, then we don't do them.

We closely track the systems Boeing builds for us, and they're some very capable systems. So that's been my focus. It is something that I look at every month. I look at the metrics for all major combat systems and our platforms, which Boeing builds many, and they're successful platforms.

I'm always careful what clients I take.

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.

We have standards. Anybody with the kind of journalism experience and professionalism that you have displayed over these years can not work for my program.

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.

The main thing I do is to carry myself as best as I can on my pro level.

So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.