Steven Johnson Quotes

41 quotes in 907 categories

• The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.
• That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
• Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders.…
• Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining…
• Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
• When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
• How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence…
• Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel…
• Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense…
• Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using…
• One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe…
• We need to play each others instruments.
• Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.
• Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical…
• If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
• The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways…
• One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern…
• It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for…
• Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a…
• We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

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