Edmund White Quotes

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.

The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will not be on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

The vision of the Internet as a vast digital wasteland isn't correct. Everything is awesome, and we have more stuff to read than we ever have in history.

I think the whole world has been able to utilize the Internet. I feel like you don't have to be from a certain soil.

The Internet has enriched my own life immeasurably.

One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.

I get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

How absurd that our students tuck their cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPods into their backpacks when they enter a classroom and pull out a tattered textbook.

We'd been noticing how much more important the internet had become - once information is out there in the world now, anyone can get it. Since that was beginning to happen with the record anyway, we figured, OK, let's just stream it for free ourselves.

Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

When Wikipedia first started, the only people interacting on the Internet were hard core geeks. Now everyone is there, and they're attracted to the easy, free ways to interact.

Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society.

Media and technology are our greatest assets. And yet, they are our most undervalued and underused assets. Now when I say that, people look at me like I'm crazy because every young person we know in the world is never without media, ever.

E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.

With the Internet, information is knowledge and knowledge is freedom.

The Internet is fundamentally free, and when faced with the decision to use something free, we, as humans, always seek to grab all we can.

Music, photography, media, film - it's all going to be free on the Internet. We have to accept it.

The Internet and digital technologies can and will boost economic, social, and political development, including by vastly expanding the capacity of individuals to enjoy their right to freedom of speech and expression, which is key to empowering human rights.

The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer's attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers, and - to put it into Microsoft parlance - customers.