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.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

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

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.

Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community – not from governmental restraints.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

New roads; new ruts.

The progress of India is the destiny of one-sixth of humanity. And it will also mean a world more confident of its prosperity and more secure about its future.

I will keep America moving forward, always forward, for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand Points of Light. This is my mission, and I will complete it.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

As everything becomes digitized, there’s the idea that things that can’t be digitized become more valuable.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

Without deviation progress is not possible.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

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.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

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

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

Life is about growing and improving and getting better.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

No. I mean those people really did something for designers I don’t think department stores can, could or should do still today. Today the world is different so you have to make it differently. There’s TV. There’s a lot of things.

The United States fully accepts the profound truth that our own progress, prosperity, and peace are interlocked with the progress, prosperity, and peace of all humanity.

Computers make me totally blank out.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

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

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.

Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

I think there will be PCs at every price point.

I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

In this experiment, made on the 9th of October, 1876, actual conversation, backwards and forwards, upon the same line, and by the same instruments reciprocally used, was successfully carried on for the first time upon a real line of miles in length.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

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

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.