People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

- Jaron Lanier

My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.

- Jaron Lanier

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

- Jaron Lanier

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

- Jaron Lanier

I'm an advocate of human nature.

- Jaron Lanier

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

- Jaron Lanier

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

- Jaron Lanier

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.

- Jaron Lanier

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

- Jaron Lanier

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

- Jaron Lanier

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

- Jaron Lanier

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.

- Jaron Lanier

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

- Jaron Lanier

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

- Jaron Lanier

Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.

- Jaron Lanier

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

- Jaron Lanier

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.

- Jaron Lanier

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.

- Jaron Lanier

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

- Jaron Lanier

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

- Jaron Lanier