Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

I’m an inventor.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

I think right now it’s a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers, and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Young people can create beautiful things.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

The Internet, man, is a beautiful thing.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

To innovate is not to reform.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

Think off-center.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

While I have never learned to use a computer, I am surrounded by family and friends who carry information to me from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and various websites.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

I’m a geek.

I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

I mean Facebook is no longer a company, it’s a country. 2 billion users. It can influence what we think, what we believe, how we vote, what we buy, even how we feel.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

Fashion has become so whatever. I don’t think there are any stones left to unturn.

I’m not a futurist.

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.

I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

The Internet is a big distraction.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

I love good, loud speakers.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.