Jeff Bezos Quotes

Ebooks had to happen.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

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.

Strip malls are history.

I’m a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they’re simpler for customers.

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

You know you’re not anonymous on our site. We’re greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.

I know Elon, we’re very like minded in many ways. We’re not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it’s one thing. He’s singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don’t find that Plan B idea motivating. I don’t want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.

In this industry, there’s a lot of cases of being a competitor in one way, but you’re often a customer and a vendor in another way. It’s not atypical in aerospace. Actually, it’s not that atypical in a lot of industries.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people’s progress.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you’ll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn’t sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.

I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet – how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn’t in place.

Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Beautiful speech doesn’t need protection, it’s ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don’t have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

I’m skeptical that the novel will be ‚re-invented.‘

When we build our own colonies, we can do them in near-Earth vicinity, because people are going to want to come back to Earth. Very few people – for a long time, anyway – are going to want to abandon Earth altogether.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.

I don’t know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that’s why that’s Blue Origin’s mission.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.

We’re working on New Glenn, which is our orbital vehicle, but we have in our mind’s eye an even bigger vehicle called New Armstrong.

If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It’s hard to get off of that equilibrium.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar and spectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.

One of the things that I’m very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we’re at today with space launch is that we don’t get to practice enough.

The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

Great industries are never made from single companies. There is room in space for a lot of winners.