Quotes from Martin Cooper

The biggest innovation of all is social networking, and cellular technology is the facilitator for social networking. People are mobile; social networking is people, and the only way people connect with each other is wirelessly.

You should not be a slave to your telephone. The technology is there to serve you, not the other way around.

I'm always trying whatever the latest telephone is.

I think what's really going to happen is we're going to have a lot of different kinds of phones when our industry grows up - some that are just plain, simple telephones. In fact, my wife and I started a company, and she designed the Jitterbug, which is just a simple telephone.

The optimum telephone is one that I think some day is gonna be embedded behind your ear. It's gonna have an extraordinarily powerful computer running the cell phone.

What we did with this mobile telephone was create a revolution. Before the mobile phone existed we were calling a place, now we are calling a person.

A telephone number shouldn't represent a home or a car or a restaurant, but instead a person.

It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things.

If you want people to think out of the box, you shouldn't create the box in the first place.

My wife has forced me to wear designer jeans, and I find... there must be two or three hundred different kinds of jeans you can wear, all of which are made out of denim and look roughly the same. People are different. They have different tastes, different bodies. Cellphones ought to be the same.

Anyone who dials a phone while driving is flirting with death. And anyone who texts while driving is insane.

If you asked me what the most important thing in my life is, it's learning.

The public doesn't adopt radical concepts very quickly.

The more we learn about new communications, the more capacity we need, and that is going to keep going on forever. That's been happening since radio was invented, and that's going to keep going.

Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire.

Wireless is freedom. It's about being unleashed from the telephone cord and having the ability to be virtually anywhere when you want to be.

I think that wireless has the opportunity to solve a whole bunch of problems, including I believe world poverty.

Cellular was the forerunner to true wireless communications.

Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.

WattUp is one of those rare breakthroughs that recognizes that the so-called 'battery' problem in wireless devices is solved with a charging solution that is transparent to the user. The cell phone with a dead battery can become a relic of the past. The days of wired, mat-based and proximity charging are over.

People are mobile. They move around, and anytime they want to communicate, if you tie them to the wall or the wires, you're restricting them, you're infringing on their freedom.

Just remember, in 1973, we had no digital cameras, no personal computers, no Internet. The thought of putting a billion transistors in a cell phone was ludicrous.

Engineers and entrepreneurs are fundamentally dissatisfied with the way the world is and want to make it better. There are so many things you could do with technology if you can match it up with real problems.

The only thing I don't like is being called the 'grandfather of the cellphone' because that makes me a little older than I prefer to be.