Nicholas Negroponte

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.

One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.