Quotes & Sayings About Silicon

The surviving intelligent life form on Earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. — Paul MacCready

No place in the US better exemplifies the ethos to engineer new digital technologies than Silicon Valley — John Maeda

Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley. — Steve Jurvetson

With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who will live long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever. — Steven Kotler

The dissonance that I felt daily flew in the face of what Silicon Valley says about itself: that it is a meritocracy, that it values intelligence and creativity, that everyone has a fair shot if they just work hard enough. This was true only if you were technical, and even that may not always be enough: in the age of the social network, who you know and who your friends were was becoming increasingly important. — Katherine Losse

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner. — Peter Thiel

The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world. — Jeanette Winterson

There's an adage in Silicon Valley that people who use online services are not the customers. We're the product. As — Dan Lyons

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture. — Brit Morin

Despite all the talk of radical Islam and CHristian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. — Yuval Noah Harari

When I first came to the Bay area, I worked in Silicon Valley in the early to mid-'90s, and I think what mattered then was our ability as designers to create a vision around people's ideas. — Yves Behar

In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters. — Katherine Losse

I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it. - DANIEL HILL, COFOUNDER OF THINKING MACHINES CORP. — Michio Kaku

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance. — Eric Ries

He didn't buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector. — Michael Lewis

The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood. — Peter Thiel

Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth. — Michael Lewis

The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley. — Niklas Zennstrom

Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It's not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types. — Jeffrey Kluger

Time it sparked a little glow in Cinder's silicon heart. — Marissa Meyer

I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partly responsible for Silicon Valley's feverish, get-it-done-yesterday work norms. — Gary Hamel

Japan will change. Let's create a country where innovation is constantly happening, giving birth to new industries to lead the world, when I visit Silicon Valley I want to think about how we can take Silicon Valley's ways and make them work in Japan. — Shinzo Abe

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back. — John Sandford

I know it's a cliche, but I see myself as a citizen of the world. I was brought up in Switzerland by German and Turkish parents but I've very much grown up in San Francisco. I have a European sense of aesthetic, but I'm also deeply steeped in the notion of change and entrepreneurship that is associated with Silicon Valley. — Yves Behar

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society. — Tyler Cowen

I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker. — Jon Oringer

I got lucky because my dad moved us to Silicon Valley before it really was known worldwide as an important tech hub. — Robert Scoble

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general. — James Whistler

If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not. — Bill Maris

It's happening: Lou Dobbs' dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. — Sarah Lacy

The more angels we have in Silicon Valley, the better. We are funding innovation. We are funding the next Facebook, Google, and Twitter. — Ron Conway

The culture around here is much less cutthroat than it is in, say, Silicon Valley, or even within the non-profit culture in D.C.. — Ethan Zuckerman

In 2010, foreign students received more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.'s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure is closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America's potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future - all rest on its immigration policies. — Fareed Zakaria

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy. — Bill Gates

I am always looking for ways to move technology away from being over-featured. Moving to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s meant I grew up as a designer in an environment where technology is a tool and not a means to an end. I believe that design should be driven by ideas, not style. — Yves Behar

Carl responding to something Camilla did, "The next time you touch my equipment, I'm going to puncture your silicon boobs and then claim it happened because you resisted arrest after threatening to slug me with one of your brother's trophies. When I slap the cuffs on you, and you're waiting for the doctor as you stare at the blank white wall of a prison cell in Hillerod, you'll dream about taking back that pat you just gave me. Shall we proceed, or do do have anything to add regarding my nobler parts? — Jussi Adler-Olsen

The first human-to-computer uploads of 2100 will prove that a perfect simulation is the thing being simulated - that a silicon soul doesn't need a physical body to inhabit. So eventually everybody who ever lived will be resurrected inside a living machine indistinguishable from God. Isn't it amazing what you can do with unlimited hard-disk space? — Frank J. Tipler

I hope to someday live in a world where there are lots more Silicon Valleys. — Marc Andreessen

We tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy - note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups. — Elon Musk

Fritz Mondale is not some synthetic Masked Marvel or Mystery Man. He is not made of silicon and micro-chip flakes. He is made of flesh and blood and brains. — Lane Kirkland

MOSFETs can be constructed as either NMOS or PMOS types, based on the arrangement of doped silicon used. Silicon doped with boron is called P-type (positive) because it lacks electrons, whereas silicon doped with phosphorus is called N-type (negative) because it has an excess of free electrons. — Scott Mueller

I had better cellular coverage on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea than I have in many parts of Silicon Valley. — Roger McNamee

Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page. — Russell T. Davies

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much. — Steve Jobs

Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious. — Dan Farmer

The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms. Now, — John Updike

Social life was different for me in college. I didn't go to as many parties as my friends did. I didn't join a sorority because I knew I couldn't make a long-term commitment. I was constantly traveling back and forth from Silicon Valley to Austin for internships. It was hard, but it was worth it for where I wanted to go. — Brit Morin

I've spent a good part of my life in Silicon Valley, California, and I really like that place. — Richard Li

I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. — Tim Cook

Israel is the second Silicon Valley, and it is therefore the only other place we have chosen to expand our activities. — Michael Moritz

The hardware and the software will come from Silicon Valley. But the watch case, the dial, the design, the idea, the crown, that part of the watch will, of course, be Swiss. — Jean-Claude Biver

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now. — Dave Rowntree

The pressure to perform is relentless in today's workplace - regardless of where you work. We are all being asked to do more with less. I think what we could borrow from the culture of Silicon Valley is "eat your own dog food ." That is an expression used by tech types to mean using what you make or sell. — Willow Bay

Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley. — Temple Grandin

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. — Ken Auletta

A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don't understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook. — Evgeny Morozov

I don't think you can look at my history and say they love me to death in Silicon Valley. — Kara Swisher

I never knew Steve Jobs. I met him once, but I never knew him. But growing up in the Silicon Valley, he was the hero. He was the guy. — Jon M. Chu

If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn't know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it's not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. — Mark Zuckerberg

One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley. — Dick Costolo

Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. — D.H. Lawrence

When you're the first guy to put out the piece of silicon that's half as expensive or twice as powerful, you bring a capability to the market that nobody else does - or can. — Brian Krzanich

ISIS is recruiting through the Internet. ISIS is using the Internet better than we are using the Internet, and it was our idea. What I wanted to do is I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they're doing. — Donald Trump

Two million people live in Silicon Valley and one million of them believe they've discovered the next big thing. — Ben Smith

Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy. — Mark Zuckerberg

[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure. — Kurt Vonnegut

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere. — Brad Stone

Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be real breakthroughs we'd been missing. — Ashlee Vance

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

Look at what Silicon Valley has done - the advance of computers. — Buzz Aldrin

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information. — Evgeny Morozov

We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning — Reid Hoffman

In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos. — Reid Hoffman

Where you live matters: there's only one MIT. And there's only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn't a coincidence: for whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don't settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too - follow them. — Drew Houston

Nothing with meat inside it could outrun metal and silicon. — James S.A. Corey

SILICON VALLEY WAS THE BIRTHPLACE OF LORD MACHINA, — Julie Kagawa

My mission is to grow business in Silicon Alley. — Jason Calacanis

A point to remember. As any technology advances, its methods and equipment do not become more complex; they become simplified. (Take, for example, printed circuits, silicon chips.) Such equipment may not be recognizable to a civilization of inferior knowledge. The point is we may be looking at objects - quite exciting objects - without recognizing them. Who would have expected that items in Baghdad Museum, long labelled as "ritual objects," would prove to be components of batteries? Do you see what I mean? — Jonathan Gray

I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last ... Whether it's tech or fashion, it must be for the customer. — Tadashi Yanai

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The problem is Silicon Valley, which is an amazing ecosystem, also ends up being an amazing bubble, with white guys talking to white guys about white-guy problems. So it's great, but you kind of miss a lot of things around you. — Maelle Gavet

China is to stock fraud as Silicon Valley is to technology. — Muddy Waters

I have always been very tech-focused, which you may almost say is the traditional CEO in Silicon Valley. — Michael Birch

The City of London has never been known for understanding technology and has never matched Silicon Valley's tradition of knowledgeable investment in technology start-ups, just as the U.K. government has never matched the vast investment made by the U.S. government. — Geoff Mulgan

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good. — Orson Scott Card

South Florida's international connections mean there's a different kind of innovation here. We're able to intersect with a lot of brilliant people who are not associated with Silicon Valley. — Rony Abovitz

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley. — Michael Lewis

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India, saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech: that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere. — Sarah Lacy

Entrepreneurship is seen as if you're in Silicon Valley or New York City and starting an app business or a social-media business, which is cool. But what we really have to focus on is people who make things, and how can we fund them, and how can we encourage people to stay in their community and make a difference in their community. — Hamdi Ulukaya

The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people — Reid Hoffman

By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and learn more about computers and the Internet. I just fell in love with technology and the potential of everything the Internet had to offer. — Brit Morin

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business. — Walter Isaacson

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It — Michael Lewis

The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like, it's not very sexy. — Jason Calacanis

more than just a corporate thriller, its about the lifestyle and culture of Silicon Valley — Patrick Krejcik

The realization is dawning that government doesn't work. In Silicon Valley, they already get this. And they are bright enough to be asking what we can do to solve problems. — Rand Paul

If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life. — Nathaniel Popper

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way. — Dan Simmons