Esther Dyson Quotes

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.

If the past decade was the decade of searching and finding and looking for stuff, this coming decade is going to be the decade of filtering and going to your friends for recommendations.

I think we really made a mistake in separating the Internet from capitalism in a certain way that is bad for our country.

I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.

No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.

Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.

I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.

I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.

Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.

The best investor is your customer.

Always make new mistakes.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.