Quotes from Alan Kay

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we're just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent and put out without a surgeon general's warning.

Most people have managed to get by without being educated…because, in order to make education more user-friendly, they managed to forget about the changes in people's brains that are supposed to happen.

The best way tp predict the future is to invent it.

we predict the future, the best way to predict the future is to invent it

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.