Esther Dyson Quotes (41 Quotes)

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.

What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

A lot of governments fear American imperialism of all kinds, whether it is our food or our Internet. I think that the people like McDonald's hamburgers and they also like the Internet, so it's kind of the government trying to control what people do.

The internet has many fathers but he's one of the main ones. He's an evangelist to the internet community and the technical community.

There are not going to be giant revelations. We're just telling the truth.

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes - I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing.

I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

Microsoft's competition -- most of it has been pretty inadequate. I don't see any reason to think that -- with all due respect -- a bunch of government lawyers are going to be any more clever than your average company, let alone Microsoft,

Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

It's sad. The kids are growing up. They've lost youth and innocence. Now they have to start being grown-ups and playing at least to some extent by grown-up rules.

We try to reflect Internet opinion and not go off half-cocked.

This changes the balance of power.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

That was when I decided that I was going to keep doing this as half of what I was doing - just somehow try to foster Silicon Valley in Eastern Europe.

Our job is not simply to accredit registrars. It's to make sure the test works,

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.

And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.

There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.

I had taken Russian in high school, but then I hadn't done anything with it. I'd always wanted to go to Russia but I was busy with my day job.

Today's announcement marks a major milestone in the joint efforts of the public and private sectors to bring Internet users the benefits of real competition in registration services in the most popular Internet domains -- .com, .net, and .org.

Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

These two sessions are the part of PC Forum where the users really take charge. Our general sessions get active audience participation, but in our breakout sessions there is no audience. The breakouts this year are devoted to the edgiest areas -- content and identity -- where users really understand why they want to take charge, and want better tools and services for doing so. Many of our attendees are active developers as well as users of such tools -- but they have been so busy working they haven't had the chance to meet or check out each other's work.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

You have to be a grownup. You have to decide what government should do and not do. And what's its appropriate size and what's its appropriate scale.

The simple truth is that it will get better, but it won't go back to being what we thought was normal before, ... That was nutty.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.