150 Internet-Inspired Quotes

In an era where the digital landscape continually shapes our thoughts, expressions, and daily interactions, the internet stands as an endless source of wisdom, humor, and insight. From viral tweets to poignant blog posts, the online world has given birth to countless memorable quotes that encapsulate the essence of our connected lives. Whether you're seeking a dose of inspiration, a spark of creativity, or simply a moment of reflection, our curated collection of the top 150 internet-inspired quotes offers a treasure trove of contemporary wit and wisdom to explore. Dive into the eclectic mix of thoughts that have resonated with millions, and let the power of the internet's voice inspire your journey.

1. “We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.” - Robert Wilensky

2. “Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.” - Neal Stephenson

3. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” - William Gibson

4. “Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. ” - Roger Ebert

5. “Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” - Douglas Adams

6. “Any idiot can put up a website.” - Patricia Briggs

7. “Maruman does not loll.” - Isobelle Carmody

8. “Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.” - Alberto Manguel

9. “Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ” - Tara Bray Smith

10. “In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects against the media.” - Marc Stiegler

11. “[I]m Internet [ist] Aufmerksamkeit eine echte Ware geworden, die sich bereits im Moment ihrer Entstehung vermarkten lässt.” - Sascha Lobo

12. “Das Web 2.0 bedeutet vor allem, dass die soziale Reichweite des Einzelnen größer ist als die Reichweite der eigenen Stimme.” - Sascha Lobo

13. “Das Netz ist das Ende des Mainstreams [...]” - Sascha Lobo

14. “It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones. There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.” - William Gibson

15. “I am charging you with the protection of my mother and friends, not to mention keeping my younger self off the Internet. He is as dangerous as Opal.” - Eoin Colfer

16. “It doesn't matter if they hate you, or embarrass you, or simply don't appreciate your genius for inventing the internet-""You invented the internet?"It was my idea, Martha said.Rats are delicious, George said."It was my idea!" Hermes said. "I mean the internet, not the rats. But that's not the point.” - Rick Riordan

17. “The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.” - Ben Elton

18. “[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.” - Clay Shirky

19. “[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.” - Clay Shirky

20. “The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.” - Clay Shirky

21. “[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.” - Clay Shirky

22. “Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.” - Clay Shirky

23. “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” - Cory Doctorow

24. “Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” - Clay Shirky

25. “A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.” - Clay Shirky

26. “Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.” - Clay Shirky

27. “Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.” - Clay Shirky

28. “Aunt Prue was holding one of the squirrels in her hand, while it sucked ferociously on the end of the dropper. 'And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they'll learn ta clean themselves.' That was a visual I didn't need. 'How could you possibly know that?' 'We looked it up on the E-nternet.' Aunt Mercy smiled proudly. I couldn't imagine how my aunts knew anything about the Internet. The Sisters didn't even own a toaster oven. 'How did you get on the Internet?' 'Thelma took us ta the library and Miss Marian helped us. They have computers over there. Did you know that?” - Kami Garcia

29. “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.” - Earl Warren

30. “The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.” - Tim O'Reilly

31. “We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption.” - John Mariotti

32. “My blog is a collection of answers people don’t want to hear to questions they didn’t ask.” - Sebastyne Young

33. “Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.” - Paul Samuelson

34. “Be careful who you choose as your hero or who you choose to deify, be it Clay Aiken or Barack Obama. You put all you're hope and all your dreams and all your ideas about stuff into one human being. They're a human being they're going to let you down. You can't make someone your hero because of something you read on the internet. The internet is not a source of information it is a source of disinformation.” - Craig Ferguson

35. “I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.” - Ray Bradbury

36. “Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.” - John Green

37. “The internet is 95 percent porn and spam” - Margaret Atwood

38. “It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.” - George W. Bush

39. “The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.” - Timothy Leary

40. “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” - Eric Schmidt

41. “Distracted from distraction by distraction” - T.S. Eliot

42. “I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.” - Andrew Sullivan

43. “You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.” - Boris Johnson

44. “It used to be on the Internet no one knew you were a dog. Now not only doeseveryone know that you are a dog, they know what kind of a dog you are, whoyou run with, where you hide your bones, the accidental piddle behind thecouch, the fight you got into with the boxer, and your thoughts on the hotpoodle down the street.” - Nancy E. Willard

45. “Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, 'You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there's simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we'll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.” - Chuck Klosterman

46. “We the people have no excuse for starry-eyed sycophantic group-think in the Information Age. Knowledge is but a fingertip away.” - Tiffany Madison

47. “The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.” - Ray Bradbury

48. “See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet.” - CrimethInc.

49. “Wie de filosofie van internet kent, kan betere websites bouwen.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

50. “Al eens geprobeerd een huis te (laten) bouwen zonder bouwtekeningen? Probeer dan ook geen website te bouwen zonder Internet Project Plan.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

51. “Het gaat om het stellen van de juiste vragen en het verzamelen van zo veel mogelijk relevante informatie.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

52. “Twee eenvoudige vragen die de basis vormen voor de doelgroepbepaling zijn: Wat is het? Wat komt hij doen?” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

53. “Wat de bezoeker gewend is op internet, is meestal het beste.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

54. “Inspiratie? Het is geen kwestie van naar de lucht staren en wachten tot er een briljant idee uit komt vallen.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

55. “Om de juiste technische keuzes te kunnen maken, moet u eerst de technische mogelijkheden kennen.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

56. “Het is zaak om uw website op een integere manier te optimaliseren. Bouw een site voor bezoekers en niet voor zoekmachines.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

57. “Als u de regelgeving goed toepast, komt u in ieder geval niet voor onverwachte dingen te staan.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

58. “Als iedereen zich aan de standaarden zou houden, zouden er minder gefrustreerde webontwikkelaars en internetgebruikers rondlopen.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

59. “Zorg voor mooi webdesign in combinatie met een goed functioneel ontwerp.” - Hedwyg van Groenendaal

60. “...he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch.” - Yann Martel

61. “The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.” - Mitch Albom

62. “The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.” - William Gibson

63. “My Google-fu is strong.” - China Miéville

64. “À medida que a mídia convencional tradicional é substituída por uma imprensa personalizada, a internet torna-se um espelho de nós mesmos. Em vez de usá-la para buscar notícias, informação ou cultura, nós a usamos para SERMOS de fato a notícia, a informação e a cultura.” - Andrew Keen

65. “Podemos canalizar a revolução da web 2.0 de maneira construtiva, de modo que ela enriqueça ao invés de matar nossa economia, cultura e valores” - Andrew Keen

66. “the internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment” - Hubert Dreyfus

67. “Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.” - Allison Burnett

68. “You are what you share.” - Charles Leadbeater

69. “You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.” - Maggie Stiefvater

70. “The party at the bar was for an Internet literary journal that prints a hard copy version that was famous in the world of Internet literary journals that prints hard copy versions. What that means, I do not know.” - Noah Cicero

71. “Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.” - Jonathan Franzen

72. “Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.” - Seth Godin

73. “Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.” - John Green

74. “And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.” - Chitralekha Paul

75. “Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.” - Jaron Lanier

76. “A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.” - Jaron Lanier

77. “The Internet is for lonely people. People should live.” - Charlton Heston

78. “Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.” - Steven Johnson

79. “Chance favors the connected mind.” - Steven Johnson

80. “Technology offers us a unique opportunity, though rarely welcome, to practice patience.” - Allan Lokos

81. “In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.” - Criss Jami

82. “The internet, where everything is free except porn sites.” - Larry Moniz

83. “I always wonder why condescending snarkiness is the chosen method of communication for so many forum users. It seems to me like these things would be much better expressed in non-confrontational, polite manner.” - Gavin Dunne

84. “I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.” - Jennifer Egan

85. “Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.” - Robert D. Putnam

86. “I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.” - Douglas Adams

87. “Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.” - Gavin John Adams

88. “Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.” - Charles Stross

89. “I'm on the Internet. I stay informed. They let old people on the Internet, you know.” - Stephen Emond

90. “A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy.” - Jeff Greenfield

91. “I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who both argue in a semi-literate way that neo-conservativism is Trotskyism and 'permanent revolution' reborn.Sometimes, you have to comb an overt anti-Semitism out of this propaganda before you can even read it straight. And I can guarantee you that none of these characters has any idea at all of what the theory of 'permanent revolution' originally meant.” - Christopher Hitchens

92. “Can we go back to using Facebook for what it was originally for - looking up exes to see how fat they got?” - Bill Maher

93. “Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.” - Robin Wasserman

94. “I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

95. “The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn't believe their eyes as I folded down to my knees and fell to the ground face-first, with my eyes open. Motionless, I watched ants hurry in and out of a hole and I knew that standing up again would be a thousand times harder than the dragon or the swamp and so I did not even try. I just clicked on one thing after another after another.” - Miranda July

96. “I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.” - Brian Eno

97. “1973 Fair Information Practices:- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.- Your data should be secure...while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends.” - Eli Pariser

98. “The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.” - Esther Dyson

99. “Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.” - Edward Abbey

100. “The internet is just a world passing notes around a classroom.” - Jon Stewart

101. “Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of which you might not trust your friends with.” - Eli Pariser

102. “Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.” - Catherynne M. Valente

103. “With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.” - Orson Scott Card

104. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” - Neil Gaiman

105. “This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.” - Jaron Lanier

106. “The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.” - Jaron Lanier

107. “Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.” - Jaron Lanier

108. “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.” - Jaron Lanier

109. “Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.” - Jaron Lanier

110. “A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.” - Jaron Lanier

111. “The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

112. “One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...” - Clay Shirky

113. “But the truth is that the world has changed. And not participating in the conversation is a loud statement of its own to your customer base. You can’t control your branding message in any case because your customers are already talking about you online. The best you can do is to participate.” - Vanessa Fox

114. “Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.” - Chuck Palahniuk

115. “To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.” - Ray Bradbury

116. “Technology is cold, find a real hand to hold.” - Paul McGirl

117. “The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.” - Julian Assange

118. “F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused.” - Chuck Klosterman

119. “I dinnae get people, like they all want to be watched, to be seen, like all the time. They put up their pictures online and let people they dinnae like look at them! And people they’ve never met as well, and they all pretend tae be shinier than they are – and some are even posting on like four sites; their bosses are watching them at work, the cameras watch them on the bus, and on the train, and in Boots, and even outside the chip shop. Then even at home – they’re going online to look and see who they can watch, and to check who’s watching them!” - Jenni Fagan

120. “I did Google him, you know.""Oh, so you GOOGLED him Oh, well, that changes everything then, doesn't it? What could I possibly worry about now that I know you've conducted such a thorough Internet search?” - Alyson Noel

121. “Most of the people you read about being turned meet vamps in clubs or over the Internet...Ew, did you...?""Yes, I met a vampire on the Internet, went to his evil love den, and let him turn me, because I'm that brainless.” - Molly Harper

122. “This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.” - Laurier Rochon

123. “[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.” - Lawrence Lessig

124. “«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»” - Bruce Sterling

125. “«Brixie wasn’t talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»” - Bruce Sterling

126. “«“Everybody is in trouble with my dad. My dad only sort of gets the Internet. My dad started looking up all his old enemies on Facebook. My dad picks big flamewar fights. It’s like my dad just discovered that people can talk about politics without his permission. Facebook is like his new drug, he’s getting all sweaty and manic... Farfalla, is Facebook the work of the Devil? Google is ‘not evil,’ but nobody ever said that Facebook was ‘not evil.’”»” - Bruce Sterling

127. “I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in "How tall was" and I saw "How tall was Jesus," and I'm like, "Sure," and half an hour later you're somewhere you didn't expect to be. It doesn't work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn't that crazy. I like that aspect of it.” - David Sedaris

128. “The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?” - Jonathan Rosen

129. “Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.” - John Green

130. “The web is a dangerous place for a mind begging to slack off and be distracted by nonsense.” - Michelle M. Pillow

131. “If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten!” - Marc Ostrofsky

132. “Everyone on the Internet is talking about television and everyone on television is talking about the Internet. The whole damn thing is a self-licking ice cream cone and you're blaming me?” - Daniel Suarez

133. “WOW DID I JUST SEE LIL B?THE MYTH ?? THE AMERICAN HERO AND LEGEND? WORLD WIDE LEGEND! I MEAN I DIDNT EVEN THINK HE WAS HUMAN” - Brandon McCartney

134. “Hippos are the very definition of Disney cute. There is no way you could look at a big, fat, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, "Id she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy." You would totally name her Sassy-baskets, and she would be your tutu-wearing, ballet-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassy-baskets against the world!” - Cracked.com

135. “A few years ago a friend said that I use to hunt and fish and build houses and things but now my whole life revolved around my computer I replied "But my computer revolves around the world” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

136. “…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” - Alan Jacobs

137. “When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

138. “Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

139. “What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

140. “I remember a time where Trolls were a fictitious monster from fairy tales, not arseholes on the internet looking for attention.” - Robert O'Sullivan

141. “If ever I create a website, I'll call it Two-Face Book, and I'll invite everyone to it, it will be a game board, of a whitewash chalkboard.A social network, with reserved intentions, where we can fall into our cliques and circle of friends. We can dis who we want and accept who appeals to our discretion. Where the users will keep abusing, and abusers keep using, where the computer bullies will keep swinging and the J-birds that fly by will die; where the lonely will keep seeking and the needy still go desperate, where the envious will keep hating, and the lustful will keep flashing. Where those that think ignoring, will keep one down and the wannabes will foolishly think themselves greater by the number of "likes" that pours caffeine into their coffee. We can jump on the bandwagon of likes, or reserve not to show we care. Where the scorners, scammers and stalkers lay wait to take hold of the innocent and fragile, and my pockets will get fatter as more and more will join up, where being fake is accepted. As a mirror that stares at a different face. It will be my two-face epilogue, in a 3-world dimension, of a twofold war. I will build an empire of contagious hooks, and still we will live, happily-ever disastrous.” - Anthony Liccione

142. “New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.” - Gillian Flynn

143. “We might miss the days of being unreachable.” - Melanie Gideon

144. “A internet e seus súditos derrubarão cada muro de Berlim.” - Filipe Russo

145. “The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.” - Umberto Eco

146. “There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.” - Harlan Coben

147. “He found a set of encyclopedias—like Wikipedia, but paper and very bulky.” - Michael Grant

148. “You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)” - Murray Leinster

149. “Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.” - Vera Nazarian

150. “An open internet is an open platform for debating opposing views. It allows unpopular voices to be heard.” - Newton Lee