Only the lines he actually wrote or said.
Each quotation names the book, page or web page it comes from, and most link to his own site. Nothing here is from a quote aggregator. Spelling and his double-hyphen dashes are kept.
In his words
By 'hypertext' I mean non-sequential writing-- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.
Everything is deeply intertwingled ... there are no 'subjects' at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.
You can and must understand computers NOW.
The purpose of computers is human freedom.
No one's life has yet been simplified by a computer.
In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off airconditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room.
The Xanadu project did not 'fail to invent HTML'. HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT.
Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger.
The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.
Imitating paper on a computer screen is like tearing the wings off a 747 and using it as a bus on the highway.
Calling a hierarchical directory a 'folder' doesn't change its nature any more than calling a prison guard a 'counselor'.
We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections.
SOMEONE has to have a different point of view.
The world would have been a better place if I had succeeded, but I ain't dead yet.
Designer, Generalist, Contrarian.
What others said
Tesla:Electricity = Nelson:Digital. All of the web is essentially a pale shadow of one of Ted Nelson's dreams.
Ted Nelson is the Thomas Paine of the Information Revolution.
A truly first-class mind ... one of the dozen or so most brilliant people I've met.
Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry.
Essential reading as background, enthusiasm and ideas on hypertext.
A 'systems humanist' designer whose vision of a Utopian world of intellect focused around the computer screen foresaw, from the 1960s, the kind of cyberworld that has been opened forty years later.