Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

I’m well past the age where I’m acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You’re not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you’re not going to get played on radio and you’re not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.

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

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

E-governance is easy governance, effective governance, and also economic governance. E-governance paves the way for good governance.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

You never know with these things when you’re trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Rock music is niche.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I’d become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

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

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I’d say probably in the early ’70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, ‚cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

Rock stars are good at making noise.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

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

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

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

Nothing recedes like progress.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

My musical taste and image is going to change naturally. It’s not forced; I do what comes natural to me. Sometimes, I like to be dark… other times, I like to be really light and ladylike.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.