Quotes from Tim Berners-Lee

We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.

Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

It was never clear that it wouldn't just stop (the WWW). Any time during that exponential growth, it could have stalled. I think we were never very confident until 1993.

I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.

Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.

You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.

We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.

The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.

I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.

Forming of a web of information nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the basic concept behind HyperText.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

It's a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently.

As more and more people awaken to the threats against our basic rights online, we must start a debate - everywhere - about the web we want.

It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.