Quotes from Steven Levy

The basic requirements were sky-high intelligence and unquenchable ambition. A more elusive criterion was one's Googliness.

A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn't do.

Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is 'don't be evil,' would enable evil by cooperating with China's censorship policies just to make a buck," he said in a press release. "… Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth—and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.

We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free. - Urs Hölzle

the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.

Epstein came up with an elaborate plan, including TV ads, and presented it to the board. The board rejected it. "It really came down to this," McCaffrey later said. "We have a limited budget. Do we want to put that money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign that we can't measure?" Larry and Sergey told Epstein that his interim stint was over

You can't argue with facts. You're not entitled to your own facts.

She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.

Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.

It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.

To Dick's mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, with an unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top.

To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.

toxic addictiveness... news feed and other "infinite scrolls" the worst offenders..

Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.

Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.

When you're in a hole, stop digging.

We believe that innovative authors are more likely to come from people who are independent and won't work in a software 'factory' or 'bureaucracy.

You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.

Inherently, Larry & Serge aren't paper-oriented - they're product oriented. If they have another 10 minutes, they want to make something better. They don't want to take 10 minutes to tell you something they did. - Terry Winograd

Mark Pincus smelled the social-game opportunity first. He was the guy who, with Reid Hoffman, had been part of the angel investment that, in his words, was like winning lotto. In late 2006, Matt Cohler tipped him off that Facebook was going to launch a platform and was looking for entrepreneurs to come up with apps. We don't want any money from you, he told Pincus. Just build cool stuff and we'll expose you to our traffic.

Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing.

to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;

Kay himself has conceded that technological wizards generally fall into two categories: the Michelangelo types who dream of Sistine Chapels and then actually spend years building them, and the da Vincis, who have a million ideas but seldom finish anything themselves.