Inventors

"This is for everyone"

"The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people."

"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."

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

"When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA. … Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it. Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations. I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated."

"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."

"When you go out there, the webpages you see are written by people. You're looking at a certain sub-set of the churning mass of humanity out there. So it's not that the web itself is an animal, but it's that society is this really exciting, decentralized thing, and the web, fortunately, is more or less able to echo it."

"The question, when it's posed like that, it implies that you really only measure people's value by their net worth. People are what they've done, what they say, what they stand for, rather than what they happen to have in the bank."

"I don't mind there being biased information out there. The important thing is that you should know, when you're on the web, whether you're looking at biased information or not."

"It is 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."

"Cool URIs don't change"

"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."

"The web setting out as something which was universal, something which anybody could use, I felt was very important. It's no good having something which will run on any platform if, in fact, there is a proprietary hold on it."

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones."

"There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi."

"If Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole."

"As astronomer Carl Sagan thought about what Fermi said Fermi paradox], he began to be alarmed. ...This could only mean that advanced civilizations destroy themselves before they get that far, a viewpoint Sagan published in 1966."

"MAJORANA: There are scientists who 'happen' only once in every 500 years, like Archimedes or Newton. And there are scientists who happen only once or twice in a century, like Einstein or Bohr. FERMI: But where do I come in, Majorana? MAJORANA: Be reasonable, Enrico! I am not talking about you or me. I am talking about Einstein and Bohr."

"He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active."

"Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration..."

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

"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."

"This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access."

"Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments."

"I hope it won't take long."

"I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence."

"Where are they?"

"Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light."

"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."

"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist."

"Il y a aussi deux sortes de vérités, celles de Raisonnement et celle de Fait. Les vérités de Raisonnement sont nécessaires et leur opposé est impossible, et celles de Fait sont contingentes et leur opposé est possible."

"Leibnitz, dominated by ideas of communication, is, in more than one way, the intellectual ancestor of the ideas of this book, for he was also interested in machine computation and in automata. My views in this book are very far from being Leibnitzian, but the problems with which I am concerned are most certainly Leibnitzian. Leibnitz's computing machines were only an offshoot of his interest in a computing language, a reasoning calculus which again was in his mind, merely an extention of his idea of a complete artificial language. Thus, even in his computing machine, Leibnitz's preoccupations were mostly linguistic and communicational."

"Leibnitz, though not propounding any full doctrine on evolution, gave it an impulse by suggesting a view contrary to the sacrosanct belief in the immutability of species... His punishment at the hands of the Church came a few years later, when in 1712, the Jesuits defeated his attempt to found an Academy of Science at Vienna."

"The lack of early practice in mathematics left its mark on Leibniz's later mathematical style, in which good ideas are sometimes inefficiently developed through lack of technical skill. Often he seemed to lack not only the technique but also the patience to develop the ideas conceived by his wide-ranging imagination."

"Leibniz's work lacked the depth and virtuosity of Newton's, but then Leibniz was a librarian, a philosopher, and a diplomat with only a part-time interest in mathematics."

"Leibniz's apparent corelessness stands for a fundamental philosophical problem, a quandary that reaches to the foundations of his system of philosophy. In the metaphysics he... presented to the world, Leibniz claimed that the one thing of which we can all be certain is the unity, permanence, immateriality, and absolute immunity to outside influence of the individual mind. In identifying the mind as a "monad"—the Greek word for "unity"—he positioned himself in direct opposition to Spinoza, whose allegedly materialist philosophy of mind he adamantly rejected. And yet the philosopher who made the unity of the individual the fundamental principle of the universe was himself incomparably fragmented, multiplicitous, exposed to the influence of others, and impossible to pin down. How could a monad be so multifarious, not to say nefarious?"

"Long before most of these facts were discovered, Leibnitz had conjectured that originally the earth in general, even in the north, enjoyed a much warmer temperature than in the present period of all-ruling and progressive frost; and Buffon and others have established on this idea their hypothesis of a vast central fire in the interior of the earth. The interior parts of the earth and its internal depths are a region totally impervious to the eye of mortal man, and can least of all be approached by those ordinary paths of hypothesis adopted by naturalists and geologists."

"In Leibniz, a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure in unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins."

"In Locke's own day, his chief philosophical opponents were the Cartesians and Leibniz. ...Until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it might have seemed as if the older philosophical tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were being definitely overcome by the newer empirical method. The newer method, however, had never prevailed in German universities, and after 1792 it was held responsible for the horrors of the Revolution."

"Plato, in the Theaetetus, had set to work to refute the identification of knowledge with perception, and from his time onwards almost all philosophers, down to and including Descartes and Leibniz, had taught that much of our most valuable knowledge is not derived from experience."

"[We] will discuss Soul and Body, the doctrine of God, and Ethics. ...We shall find that Leibniz no longer shows great originality, but tends, with slight alterations of phraseology, to adopt (without acknowledgment) the views of the decried Spinoza. We shall find also many more minor inconsistencies than in the earlier part of [Leibniz's] system, these being due chiefly to the desire to avoid the impieties of the Jewish Atheist, and the still greater impieties to which Leibniz's own logic should have led him."

"The principle premisses of Leibniz's philosophy appear to me to be five... : I. Every proposition has a subject and a predicate. II. A subject may have predicates which are qualities existing at various times. (Such a subject is called a substance.) III. True propositions not asserting existence at particular times are necessary and analytic, but such as assert existence at particular times are contingent and synthetic. The latter depend upon final causes. IV. The Ego is a substance. V. Perception yields knowledge of an external world, ie. of existents other than myself and my states. The fundamental objection to Leibniz's philosophy will be found to be the inconsistency of the first premiss with the fourth and fifth; and in this inconsistency we shall find a general objection to Monadism."

"As an interpreter of nature... Leibnitz stands in no comparison with Newton. His general views in physics were vague and unsatisfactory; he had no great value for inductive reasoning; it was not the way of arriving at truth which he was accustomed to take; and hence, to the greatest physical discovery of that age, and that which was established by the most ample induction, the existence of gravity as a fact in which all bodies agree, he was always incredulous, because no proof of it, a priori could be given."

"Substances do not interact. Every substance is eternal. Bodies are phenomena, not independently real. Choices are determined but free. This is the best possible world. I first encountered Leibniz in an introduction to Modern Philosophy and the image of him as a philosopher so enthralled with his reasoning as to deny the reality in front of him stuck with me for a long time. It wasn't that his arguments were bad, but that their conclusions seemed obviously false. Wouldn't a swift kick in the shin suffice to prove that substances do interact, that bodies are real, and perhaps even that this is not the best possible world? This image of Leibniz as naive and detached from reality was cemented by Voltaire's satirical character Dr Pangloss, who insists over and over again - in the face of the worst suffering and injustice - that this is the best possible world. There is some irony in this image of Leibniz, as Leibniz was the far opposite of an 'ivory tower' philosopher. He consistently pursued positions that would increase his political influence over positions that would increase his leisure for study and reflection. Leibniz claimed the progress of knowledge as his main goal, but he approached this goal from two sides, on one side through his own research and writing while on the other side promoting institutions that would better support, disseminate, and apply knowledge. Today, Leibniz is best known or at least most widely read for his philosophical writings, but philosophy represents only a small part of his life's work. Although this book will focus on explaining Leibniz's philosophy, that philosophy must be approached from within the broader context of his life and time."

"In letters which went between me and that most excellent geometer. G.G. Leibniz, ten years ago, when I signified that I was in the knowledge of a method of determining maxima and minima, of drawing tangents, and the like, and when I concealed it in transposed letters involving this sentence (Data æquatione, etc., above cited) that most distinguished man wrote back that he had also fallen upon a method of the same kind, and communicated his method, which hardly differed from mine, except in his forms of words and symbols."

"Plus un, moins un, plus un, moins un, etc. En ajoutant les deux premiers termes, les deux suivans, et ainsi du reste, on transforme la suite dans une autre dont chaque terme est zéro. Grandi, jésuite italien, en avait conclu la possibilité de la création; parce que la suite étant toujours égale à ½, il voyait cette fraction naìtre d'une infinité de zéros, ou du néant. Ce fut ainsi que Leibnitz crut voir l'image de la création, dans son arithmétique binaire ou il n'employait que les deux caractères zéro et l'unité. Il imagina que l'unité pouvait représenter Dieu, et zéro, lé néant; et que l'Être Suprême avait tiré du néant, tous les êtres; comme l'unité avec le zéro, exprime tous les nombres dans ce système. Cette idée plut tellement à Leibnitz, qu'il en fit part au jésuite Grimaldi, président du tribunal des mathématiques à la Chine, dans l'espérance que cet emblème de la création convertirait au christianisme, l'empereur d'alors qui aimait particulièrement le sciences. Je ne rapporte ce trait, que pour montrer jusqu'à quel point les préjugés de l'enfance peuvent égarer les plus grands hommes."

"When the Eleatic School denied the possibility of motion, Diogenes, as everybody knows, stepped forth as an opponent. He stepped forth literally, for he said not a word, but merely walked several times back and forth, thinking that thereby he had sufficiently refuted those philosophers. Inasmuch as for a long time I have been engaged, at least occasionally, with the problem whether a repetition is possible and what significance it has, whether a thing gains or loses by being repeated, it suddenly occurred to me, "Thou canst take a trip to Berlin, where thou hast been before, and convince thyself now whether a repetition is possible and what significance it may have." At home I had almost been brought to a standstill by the problem. Say what one will, it is sure to play a very important role in modem philosophy; for repetition is a decisive expression for what "recollection" was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowledge is a recollection, so will modem philosophy teach that the whole of life is a repetition. The only modem philosopher who had an inkling of this was Leibnitz ."

"Of all the works of Leibnitz, the "Theodicee" is the one most spoken of in Germany. Yet it is his feeblest production. This book, like several other writings in which Leibnitz expresses his religious sentiments, has obtained for its author an evil reputation, and has caused him to be cruelly misunderstood. His enemies have accused him of maudlin sentimentality and weakness of intellect; his friends, in defending, have proved him an accomplished hypocrite. The character of Leibnitz was for long a subject of controversy amongst us : the most partial critics could not absolve him from the accusation of duplicity; his most eager detractors were the freethinkers and the men of enlightenment. How could they pardon in a philosopher defence of the Trinity, eternal punishment, and the divinity of Christ! Their tolerance did not extend so far as that. But Leibnitz was neither fool nor knave, and by the lofty harmony of his intellect he was well able to defend Christianity in its integrity. I say, in its integrity, for he defended it against semi-Christianity. He established the consistency of the orthodox as opposed to the inconsistency of their adversaries. More than this he never attempted. He thus stood at that point of indifference where diverse systems appear as merely different sides of the same truth."

"As to Leibnitz, he is certainly a good philosopher, but in his Theodicée he goes too far and would have all actions necessary. His foreordained harmony is not the least credible nor feasible. If you can get a book entitled: An Essay on the Origin of Evil, by Dr W. King, you will find a much better solution of the question: 'whence comes evil?' Leibnitz does indeed reconcile it all with the goodness of God, but not so reasonably as Dr King."

"As Leibniz was fond of saying, it is one and the same to be a thing and to be a thing. In other words the “really real” is free from otherness, because what we could ascribe to it as other than what it is would actually be “another being.” For the same reason, being as such is free from change. In a doctrine where to be is to be the same, otherness is the very negation of being. Thus in virtue of its self-identity, which forbids it to change unless indeed it ceased to be, true being is immutable in its own right. This permanency in self-identity is the chief mark of the “really real,” that is, of being."