Quotes by Steven Johnson

“The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is ...”

“...if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whales head for an afternoon.”

“That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.”

“What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely ...”

“It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an ama...”

“We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic...”

“If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”

“Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one ...”

“Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.”

“Build a tangled bank.”

“This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.”

“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 i...”

“…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 insti...”