Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems - about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

Tim Berners-Lee
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.

Tim Berners-Lee
Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee
When somebody has learned how to program a computer … You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

Tim Berners-Lee
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.

Tim Berners-Lee
Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep.

Tim Berners-Lee
Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.

Tim Berners-Lee
The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.

Tim Berners-Lee
Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Tim Berners-Lee
I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da!— the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee
We've lost a fighter. We've lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. … We've lost a great person.

Tim Berners-Lee
I think in general it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings, and the Web's a form of communications, so it generally should be good.

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

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.

Tim Berners-Lee
What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.

Tim Berners-Lee
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Tim Berners-Lee
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

Tim Berners-Lee
In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

Tim Berners-Lee
What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is the sort we intend.

Tim Berners-Lee
Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.

Tim Berners-Lee
It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years.

Tim Berners-Lee
The Web is a tremendous grassroots revolution. All these people coming from very different directions achieved a change. There's a tremendous message of hope for humanity in that.

Tim Berners-Lee
The trick... is to make sure that each limited mechanical part of the Web, each application, is within itself composed of simple parts that will never get too powerful.

Tim Berners-Lee
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. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.

Tim Berners-Lee
The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Tim Berners-Lee