Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.

Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It’s scary.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

In this age, I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are: if you cannot create harmony – even vicious harmony – on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

I had a lot of success from the start. I never really was tested for long periods of time. I got my first professional job while I was a senior in college. I signed with the William Morris Agency before I graduated.

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort.

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

Everybody is entertained to death.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

My unpredictability is what separates me. If you move in so many ways, your opponent is not focused on what he’s doing. He’s focusing in on what you’re doing, and it freezes him. When they freeze and you hit, they shatter like glass.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I’ve been working nonstop since I was 15. I don’t even know how to chill out.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

Talent without working hard is nothing.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

What keeps me going is goals.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

I think our politicians could learn a lot from Mandela.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

Imagination rules the world.

I can move any crowd.

Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.