Alan Kay Best Quotes & Sayings

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough. — Alan Kay

When I first prepared this particular talk ... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything. — Alan Kay

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. — Alan Kay

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied. — Alan Kay

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. — Alan Kay

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in - the one that we think is reality. — Alan Kay

Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. — Alan Kay

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. — Alan Kay

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.' — Alan Kay

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

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

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully. — Alan Kay

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. — Alan Kay

Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors
is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward. — Alan Kay

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program. — Alan Kay

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas's film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. "I was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple," Jobs recalled. "But the folks running Apple weren't interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway. — Walter Isaacson

Context is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others. — Alan Kay

Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet — Alan Kay

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible. — Alan Kay

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

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

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when and for what. — Alan Kay

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. — Alan Kay

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

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. — Alan Kay

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984. — Alan Kay

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing. — Alan Kay

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy. — Alan Kay

Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are. — Alan Kay

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

It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships, — Alan Kay