Ted Nelson quotes

Ted Nelson is an American author, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. Famous for coining the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," his vision helped shape how we interact with digital information today. He advocates for new models of digital documents and remains influential in discussions about the structure of the internet. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

Ted Nelson

If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.

Ted Nelson

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Ted Nelson

Everybody has only a 24-hour day. Most people, if they increase consumption of one medium (like magazines or books) will cut down on another (like TV). This drastically reduces the sort of growth some people have been expecting.

Ted Nelson

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

Ted Nelson

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.

Ted Nelson

You can and must understand computers now!

Ted Nelson

In order for something to Catch On, it has to be standardized. Unfortunately, there is motivation for different companies to make their own little changes in order to restrict users to their own products. The best example of how to avoid this: Philips patented its audio cartridge [i. e. the standard audio "cassette"] to the teeth, but then granted everyone free use of the patent provided they adhered to the exact standard. The result has been the system's spectacular success, and Philips, rather than dominating a small market, has a share of a far larger market, and hence makes more money. That's a virtue-rewarded kind of story.

Ted Nelson

The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

Ted Nelson

So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

Ted Nelson

But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.

Ted Nelson

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

Ted Nelson

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

Ted Nelson

After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim Berners-Lee!

Ted Nelson

[Of the web] It's massively successful. It is trivially simple. Massively successful like karaoke - anybody can do it.

Ted Nelson

It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling gap between public and computer insider be closed. As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals. Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood. I see this as just one example of the creeping evil of Professionalism, the control of aspects of society by cliques of insiders. There may be some chance, though, that Professionalism can be turned around. Doctors, for example, are being told that they no longer own people's bodies. And this book may suggest to some computer professionals that their position should not be as sacrosanct as they have thought, either.

Ted Nelson

We should not impose regularity where it does not exist.

Ted Nelson

I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.

Ted Nelson

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

Ted Nelson

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

Ted Nelson

I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.

Ted Nelson

I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.

Ted Nelson