Top 40 Esther Dyson Quotes

And the Russians certainly don’t have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she’s a crook. And that’s me, the nice American. The assumption that you can’t make money honestly is a killer.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers’ co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

Don’t leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you’re doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don’t think about technology first.

Change means that what was before wasn’t perfect. People want things to be better.

The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane – those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.

You should not want to be a politician because you want to be president. You should be a politician because you want to fix the world or represent a movement.

I became a real free market fanatic. I’m probably less so now than even two or three years ago.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

My greatest vulnerability is that I’m not ‘normal.’ I’m not married, I don’t have children. It’s something I feel defensive about.

My ambition is to figure out how to help people create their own health and how to turn that into a profitable business.

In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that’s personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

Doing something totally new is tricky. If you are second – and if you are smart – you can learn from the first person’s mistakes.

A worker’s paradise is a consumer’s hell.

The best entrepreneurs have a sense of purpose that drives them.

Since I became chairman, I’ve tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

From the business point of view – not to overstate it – intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don’t get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works – I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

Indeed, though people increasingly learn and interact online, we retain a fundamental need to engage in person.

I’ve seen disgusting excess in business, and I’ve seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I’ve certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can’t ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

My life is like a series of comic strips, which is why I like investing: I really like new stuff.

The challenge of email is that people send you stuff for free, and it becomes items on your to-do list.

I enjoy it; my experiences abroad have taught me the importance of an open mind and have given me a willingness to wander off the beaten path – not only to keep life interesting, but also to understand in a meaningful way that things do not look the same from every vantage point.

I think there are too many start-ups and not enough real companies.

Summer is conference season – a critical time for building brands, making connections, and shaping industries.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can’t jump on the Internet to freedom.

It offends me when people do useless work.

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there – there’s a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there’s too much information.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

I became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter ‘Release 1.0,’ which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes – I don’t think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn’t vote for a guy who wouldn’t reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don’t expect the world that we’re familiar with to be perfect.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers’ rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody – government stay away.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it’s the system – there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it’s a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

I have had the same apartment in New York City for almost 40 years but have actually lived in it for less than half of that time, owing to a busy travel schedule.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

There’s almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you’re at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.