Tech Quotes & Sayings

You Don't Get it." This is more common in tech circles. When I was in the Bay Area in the 90's there were two kinds of people, if you listened to the nomenclature of the day. "They don't get it"meant they didn't understand, for example, that revenue didn't matter. Instead, say, "Hey, I did a bad job explaining my point, let me try again." Telling someone they don't get it is immediately combative. — Cash Nickerson

There's tonnes of room for more people in the tech market, and there are lots of content gaps that have still not yet been tapped into. — Jon Oringer

At the end of the day, tech workers are not robots: they feel, they think, they have values. — Ed Lee

The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked: needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again. — Jon Evans

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing? — Jaron Lanier

A tech-savvy Board sets a right tone for shaping the culture of innovation. — Pearl Zhu

As for companies invested in the space - I think its important to distinguish between a good investment and a material climate change technology - you can have the first without the second, even in the "clean tech" space. — Vinod Khosla

When the bureaucratic details were handled, they broke up. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins followed him back to his office, where they talked some more about the surveillance aspects. A tech would put a tracking bug on Carver's vehicle, and Del would try to get one on Dannon's, if he could do it without being seen. "The big question is: Is he gonna talk, or is he gonna stonewall, or is he gonna shoot, or is he gonna run?" Jenkins said. "That's four questions," Shrake said. "It irritates me that you can't count. — John Sandford

I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, 'Maybe someday we'll build a company. This probably isn't it, but one day we will.' — Mark Zuckerberg

I am always interested in helping and growing new tech start-ups and ideas. — John McAfee

History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies. — Barry Ritholtz

Most buildings, whether they're Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time. — Richard Rogers

We have a few young people who are very successful in it, and this gives us the wrong impression that the whole country can live off high tech. — Stef Wertheimer

The secret is not to make a film that causes something like Virginia Tech to happen. The secret is to make a film that stops it happening. — Abel Ferrara

What I love about what I get to do is that I'm allowed to create the stories that I want to tell with minimal interference by some very big corporations like Microsoft and Sprint and EA and BioWare. The advantage that these tech companies have is that they understand the space organically, versus traditional media companies. — Felicia Day

I can't really speak to the other parts of the economy, but what I think is very true of the tech world is that it's easy for talented people - whatever their gender, age, or race - to rise up and succeed. — Joy Covey

Over the years, I have repeated Eric's advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career spreadsheets to one column: potential for growth. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to work in an industry like high tech. But within any field, there are jobs that have more potential for growth than others. Those in more established industries can look for the rocket ships within their companies - divisions or teams that are expanding. And in careers like teaching or medicine, the corollary is to seek out positions where there is high demand for those skills. For example, in my brother's field of pediatric neurosurgery, there are some cities with too many physicians, while others have too few. My brother has always elected to work where his expertise would be in demand so he can have the greatest impact. Just — Sheryl Sandberg

When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don't even know what they have lost. — Catherine Steiner-Adair

I love challenging the notion that, in order to be a tech founder, you have to be holed up in a dark room wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans. — Kevin Systrom

Everything is so tech now; everyone is so connected that way. — Bill Hader

Technology should improve the quality of life for all mankind. The few people running billion-dollar tech companies should not be allowed to control the movement or development of digital goods and services. It was like a medieval lord telling the serfs that they were not only renting their land, but had to pay for the use of sickles and scythes by the hour. — Rachel Sharp

Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier's. — Lee Child

To succeed in the tech industry, you start businesses, make money, and make smart investments. But to succeed in the tech community, you do and build awesome things, are generous with your time and efforts, and make a point of making space for strangers - without any expectation of payback. — Jon Evans

I was playing video games LONG before I ever thought about playing football. If it wasn't for my parents making sure that I got outside every now and then as a child, I probably would've pursued some sort of tech path. — Chris Kluwe

I'm really interested in the current tech world because of my brother Michael. Since we were little kids, in the 1970s, he was dealing with the first computers. He works for the government. — Jimmi Simpson

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

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

I don't even know what Instagram is, All of this high-tech stuff is supposed to set us free and make life easier. To me, it makes it more difficult and demanding. — Jeff Bridges

We are the only country with an operating rover on Mars. We are an amazing country on tech. — Megan Smith

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? — Matthew De Abaitua

Brand marketers don't believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone. — John Battelle

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning. — Benedict Cumberbatch

If we go to work at 8 am and go home at 5 pm, this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8-to-5 spirit, then we should just go and do something else. — Jack Ma

You promoted me for my ruthless stubbornness and dog-headed determination, not my tech savvy. Plus, I'm a damn good shot. — Katherine McIntyre

The sight of Ethan - of Scam, since this was a mission - sent a trickle of annoyance down Crash's spine. Not like all the little itches of tech, just the ever-present need to punch him in the face. — Scott Westerfeld

I know about the tech industry in that I follow what apps are hot and software development. I know my way around different browsers. I know how to restart a computer. — T. J. Miller

My high-tech aversion caused me to make fun of the typical biotech enterprise: $100 million in cash from selling shares, one hundred Ph.D.'s, 99 microscopes, and zero revenues. — Peter Lynch

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize. — Evgeny Morozov

The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors. — David Hockney

Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-sa What I said: Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-savvy bond analyst. Drew Chapman is a debut novelist to watch. — Alafair Burke

I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency. — Andrew Weil

1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.
3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.
4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. "Hearts and minds," meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: "My gang yeah, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics. — Gary Brecher

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

Libraries have a PR problem - or at least that's what they call it when no one under the age of 40 walks through the door. To bring in a younger crowd, the paper pushers have turned to tech to bring in the public. DVDs, CDs and, yes, even videogames are hitting the shelves of your local library. — Rob Manuel

I'm not one of those playwrights who says, 'Show up, hit your marks, and don't talk to me!' I always want to hear from the other artists involved, whether it's the director, the lighting tech, or the actors. — Pearl Cleage

I would never have called myself tech-savvy. — Debra Messing

Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century. — John Doerr

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the arm of the Pentagon most responsible for shiny, futuristic technology, recently gave a $100,000 grant to Logos Technologies, Fairfax, Va.-based defense tech company, to develop a silent, hybrid-engine motorcycle for the military. — Anonymous

I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival. — Jeanette Winterson

For tech, I like the 'DailySearchCast', 'TWiT' and anything Veronica Belmont does on CNET. I think Perez Hilton is a riot, and the rest of my consumption is by people: Folks like Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, Mark Cuban, Brian Alvey, Jeff Jarvis, Xeni Jardin, etc. — Jason Calacanis

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons. — Michelle Alexander

Despite Marc Andreessen's and Peter Thiel's belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice - the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish. — Jonathan Taplin

We have a storage close by where I live, that's very organised. My guitar tech, Matty organised it all, labeled everything. — John Petrucci

Today as never before in their history, Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys - and is bent on perpetuating - has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for. — James McCartney

Leigh did what any sane female faced with such an e-mail would do: deleted it to resist the temptation of replying, cleared her trash to resist the temptation of recalling it, and then called tech support to restore all her recently deleted e-mails. (Chasing Harry Winston) — Lauren Weisberger

All media work us over completely. — Marshall McLuhan

The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need. — Richard Louv

The Nuffield report suggests that there is a moral imperative for investment into GM crop research in developing countries. But the moral imperative is in fact the opposite. The policy of drawing of funds away from low-cost sustainable agriculture research, towards hi-tech, exclusive, expensive and unsafe technology is itself ethically questionable. There is a strong moral argument that the funding of GM technology in agriculture is harming the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the developing world. — Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher

Acceleration is pressing his eyeballs out of their right shape. High tech astigmatism. — James S.A. Corey

Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder have created a compelling vision for a Clean Tech Nation and a roadmap for creating it, even as they surprise and delight readers with a rich account of progress already achieved. I salute their unique combination of technical savvy, practical sense, and imperishable enthusiasm. — Ralph Cavanagh

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

I worked at Sir-Tech, and then when I got old enough to go to college, I went to college but continued to work at Sir-Tech to put myself through college. — Brenda Brathwaite

One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives. — Astra Taylor

Mexico needs schools, rural development, and an independent judiciary, not high-tech weaponry. — Stephen Kinzer

Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate-what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even. — David Foster Wallace

I will never slide, never fall, never fail. — Tech N9ne

A lot of young people just starting out unskilled, as all Americans do when they're born here, come to this country, and so the business community is for immigration. Big businesses, small businesses, high-tech, low-tech, the communities of faith, and the Republican leadership. — Grover Norquist

NumbersUSA's work was critical to derailing the 2007 comprehensive federal immigration bill, which had, at that point, received the support of President Buch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the high-tech industry, the Catholic Church, immigrant-advocacy organizations, and several industries reliant on immigration labor, including farming, food services, and construction. During the weeks leading up to the floor vote on the bill, NumbersUSA coordinated weekly phone calls with the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, mobilized its members to engage key senators, and provided those senators with information and arguments necessary to oppose the bill. Several actors, including pro-immigrant advocates, restrictionists, and members of Congress, have credited NumbersUSA with causing the collapse of the bill in the Senate. — Pratheepan Gulasekaram

If you go back to the '50s and '60s ... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley ... and it crept northward in early 2000s. — Mitch Kapor

There was a vividly clear class distinction between tech guys and finance guys. The finance guys saw the tech guys as faceless help and were unable to think of them as anything else. — Michael Lewis

When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don't understand creativity. They don't appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they've not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We'd get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline. — Walter Isaacson

I'm consumed with tech - medical, computational, impossible tech. So, I don't know exactly what I'll wind up doing, where I'll go with all this schooling, but I'm willing that it be better than my dogmatic vision of it all. — Justine Bateman

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

The high-tech business, the semiconductor business, it's very competitive. You're out there every day slugging it out, no different from players slugging it out on the ice. — Henry Samueli

I am an unrepentant tweetaholic. I use the communications service all day long to discover news, interesting tidbits and, of course, to flack the work of our tech and media news site, Re/code. — Kara Swisher

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic," the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. "Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease. — Jaron Lanier

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated. — Matt Taibbi

Tech Jacket shares the same tone as Invincible, but the subject matter is very different. Where Invincible is about perfection, Tech Jacket is about flaws. — Robert Kirkman

Because of the way tech is changing, and becoming cheaper and user-friendly, it's becoming easier to make films cheaply, maintaining quality. — Lance Reddick

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth - they're now millions of members strong without any superfluous "buzz." They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with. — Ryan Holiday

All the ingenuity, all the high-tech gear, all the jury-rigging sometimes the sea would rip it all away until there was only you, the Creator, and His mercy. — Abby Sunderland

High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential. — Malcolm Gladwell

The only thing that scares me in the tech area is that it moves so fast that you have to be ready to invest in 20 things. Because if you just invest in one, next week, somebody has a better mousetrap, and you get taken to the cleaners. — Daymond John

I used to do tech support for MSN in Canada. — Cory Monteith

Americans need accurate information in order to consider Social Security reform. Too bad the media can't be counted upon to provide it — Herman Cain

I should have said no, but if the tech half of the business got himself killed, who would update the website? — Lindsay Buroker

To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story. — Gary Wolf

Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs. — Aaron Levie

We liked the idea that it was a low-tech future. But everything always repeats the past. If you look today and look at something in the middle east where you got people getting beheaded it's like the crusades with Twitter. It's crazy, human nature does the same thing. In a way, even though you're in the future people wanted order so this sort of system rose up. — Alfred Gough

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science. — Clara Shih

I went to Louisiana Tech, which is just down the road from where we lived. It was an easy college to get into. — Jeff Mangum

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself. — William Landay

My products and magic are free, but on the commercial side of what I do, the big tech companies are impressed with somebody like me who can emotionalize a piece of technology. — Marco Tempest

There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers. — Juan Enriquez

There are worse things than dying."
"Really?" said Meg.
"Of course," said the tech. "Living badly. — Belinda Bauer

Actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems. — David Foster Wallace

In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country. — Douglas Brinkley

With most tech guys, it's the same outfit every day - they wear their company logo. — Tony Fadell

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! — Steven Pinker

How can you rank BYU No. 1? Who'd they play - Bo Diddley Tech? — Bryant Gumbel