Free Quotes

“But our tendency to give scarcity more attention than abundance has caused us to ignore the many examples of abundance that have arisen in our own lifetime, like corn, for starters. The problem is that once something becomes abundant, we tend to ignore it,”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“5. Redefine your market.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“The way to compete with free is to move past the abundance to find the adjacent scarcity.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“which”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“10. Manage for abundance, not scarcity.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“9. free makes other things more valuable.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“8. Embrace waste.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“7. Sooner or later you will compete with free.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“6. Round down.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“4. You can make money from free.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“3. You can’t stop free.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“2. Atoms would like to be free, too, but they’re not so pushy about it.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“1. If it’s digital, sooner or later it’s going to be free.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“professional journalists who are seeing their jobs evaporate are typically those whose employers failed to find a new role in a world of abundant information. By and large, that means newspapers, which are an industry that will probably have to reinvent itself as dramatically as music labels. The top tier (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) will probably shrink a bit, and the tier below that may be decimated.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“It’s true: free does tend to level the playing field between professionals and amateurs. As more people create content for nonmonetary reasons, the competition to those doing it for money grows. (As the employer of lots of professional journalists, I think about the relative roles of the amateurs and the pros all the time.)”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you can get from free into cash.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, society is divided into two groups: one of planners and thinkers living in luxury high above the Earth, and another of workers, dwelling and toiling underground to run the machine that sustains the wealthy. The film is about the workers’ revolt, but the broader point is clear. Abundance comes at a cost: scarcity elsewhere.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“IN 1984, journalist Steven Levy published Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicled the scruffy subculture that had not only created the personal computer (and eventually the Internet) but also the unique social ethos that came with it. He listed seven principles of the “hacker ethic”: Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative! All information should be free. Mistrust authority—promote decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Today, nuclear energy costs about the same as coal, which is to say that it didn’t change the economics of electricity one bit.*”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“This is one of the negative implications of free. People often don’t care as much about things they don’t pay for, and as a result they don’t think as much about how they consume them. free can encourage gluttony, hoarding, thoughtless consumption, waste, guilt, and greed. We take stuff because it’s there, not necessarily because we want it. Charging a price, even a very low price, can encourage much more responsible behavior.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Even after most cultures established monetary economies, day-to-day transactions within close-knit social groups, from families to tribes, was still mostly without price. The currencies of generosity, trust, goodwill, reputation, and equitable exchange still dominate the goods and services of the family, the neighborhood, and even within the workplace. In general, no cash is required among friends.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Indeed, the very word “zero” has Indian origins: The Indian word for zero was sunya, meaning “empty,” which the Arabs turned into sifr. Western scholars Latinized this into zephirus, the root of our zero.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Eastern mysticism embraced both the tangible and the intangible, through the yin and yang of duality. The god Shiva was both the creator and the destroyer of worlds; indeed, one aspect of the deity Nishkala Shiva was the Shiva “without parts”—the void. Through their ability to divorce numerals from physical reality, the Indians invented algebra.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Where numbers only represent real things, you don’t need a number to express the absence of something. It is an abstract concept and only shows up when the math gets equally abstract. “The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician, in 1911. “No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinal [numbers], and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“The Greeks, meanwhile, explicitly rejected zero. Since their mathematical system was based on geometry, numbers had to represent space of one sort or another—length, angles, area, etc. Zero space didn’t make sense.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write “no wedges”? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Cross-subsidies are the essence of the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” That means that one way or another the food must be paid for, if not by you directly then by someone else in whose interest it is to give you free food.”
― Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price