Quotes by Steven Johnson

“This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. Its not that the network itself is smart; its that the individuals get smarter because theyre connected to the network.”

“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading materialmuch of it unrelated to...”

“Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is...”

“Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualitiesa certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiositybut they also share one other defining attribute. ...”

“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 platf...”

“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chron...”

“The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; ...”

“Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.”

“it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these instit...”

“The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?”

“A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what ma...”

“Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of...”

“Chance favors the connected mind.”

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

“Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they w...”

“Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didnt appear for more than a hundred years.”

“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

“The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a ...”

“Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.”

“When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.”