Quotes from Esther Dyson

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

I have had the same apartment in New York City for almost 40 years but have actually lived in it for less than half of that time, owing to a busy travel schedule.

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

My greatest vulnerability is that I'm not 'normal.' I'm not married, I don't have children. It's something I feel defensive about.

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 became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter 'Release 1.0,' which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

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

Always make new mistakes.

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.

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.

I'm cheap, and so I don't like wasting.

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.

In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.

You should not want to be a politician because you want to be president. You should be a politician because you want to fix the world or represent a movement.

The challenge of ensuring adequate, nutrient-rich food for an expanding global population is a daunting one, especially given constraints on key resources like water and agricultural land.

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.

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.

That's really why I want to go to space - I want to be weightless for so long that it gets boring.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.