Vint Cerf Quotes

“One of my favorite books is 'The Swiss Family Robinson.' The reason is, I'm fascinated by the postapocalyptic recovery. What do we do in a disaster? How do we make do?”

— Vint Cerf

“History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.”

— Vint Cerf

“The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.”

— Vint Cerf

“At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.”

— Vint Cerf

“The post office doesn't guarantee delivery, but it tries really hard. It's called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box, they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. So, that means that there's potentially disorder with your delivery, and that's also true in the Internet.”

— Vint Cerf

“Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.”

— Vint Cerf

“I am annoyed by people that send messages via FaceBook because I get an e-mail telling me there is a message on FaceBook - so I end up processing two messages for every one sent.”

— Vint Cerf

“Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.”

— Vint Cerf

“There's nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.”

— Vint Cerf

“The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.”

— Vint Cerf

“We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.”

— Vint Cerf

“Privacy may actually be an anomaly.”

— Vint Cerf

“Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.”

— Vint Cerf

“The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.”

— Vint Cerf

“The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.”

— Vint Cerf

“Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.”

— Vint Cerf

“I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can't tell jokes about it anymore - there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.”

— Vint Cerf

“I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.”

— Vint Cerf

“In a town of 3,000 people, there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.”

— Vint Cerf

“In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.”

— Vint Cerf

“The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.”

— Vint Cerf

“Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.”

— Vint Cerf

“So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.”

— Vint Cerf

“There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.”

— Vint Cerf

“What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.”

— Vint Cerf

“At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.”

— Vint Cerf

“The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.”

— Vint Cerf

“You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.”

— Vint Cerf

I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.

— Vint Cerf

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.

— Vint Cerf

Energy, health care and education are just three examples of areas in which information and information management are critically important. How are we using our energy? What appliances in homes or business are consuming the most energy? When do they consume it? Can the load be shifted? How efficient are these devices?

— Vint Cerf

“The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.”

— Vint Cerf

“Google Apps for Education is a suite of applications intended to be helpful to higher level educational institutions, but in the long run, I think Google has a role to play in helping to assemble relevant content for classroom use.”

— Vint Cerf

“Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the globe.”

— Vint Cerf

“There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.”

— Vint Cerf

“When I first joined Google in October of 2005, I was warned that I shouldn't be offended if people were doing their e-mails while a meeting was going on.”

— Vint Cerf

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

— Vint Cerf

“It's important that the adults appreciate that young people are capable of doing really astounding work.”

— Vint Cerf

“The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.”

— Vint Cerf

“There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.”

— Vint Cerf

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

— Vint Cerf

“My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we're in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration's course ignores reality.”

— Vint Cerf

“The idea that Google, Yahoo, and eBay are getting a free ride is absolutely unfair criticism. We have to build out our own infrastructure. And we have to inter-connect to the public Internet.”

— Vint Cerf

“You should know that I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.”

— Vint Cerf

“First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.”

— Vint Cerf

“I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.”

— Vint Cerf

“The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws ... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.”

— Vint Cerf

“The three-piece suit has become sort of my trademark. You don't see them much anymore. It has several benefits: You may be overdressed on some occasions, but you can manage to fit into a huge range of circumstances.”

— Vint Cerf

“Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences.”

— Vint Cerf

“When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.”

— Vint Cerf