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 do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

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.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

This may sound a little bit idealistic, but when I go to my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, I talk to different people from all over the world, and you see how it’s easy to establish a dialogue.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

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.

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

You’ve gotta understand that with branding and the way things are promoted, in our day and age, your older movie stars are not reachable or accessible because they’re not a part of the whole social media world.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

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

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.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

The country would be a lot better off if we stopped having comment sections. And if we got rid of Twitter.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

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

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

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.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

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.

The doer alone learneth.

I’m not no Internet person.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges… If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I’d care to know about you.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

The Internet made fame wack and anonymity cool.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: ‚If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?‘

MySpace is my wife… Facebook is my mistress.

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.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Once you have a computer that can do a few things – strictly speaking, one that has a certain ‚sufficient set‘ of basic procedures – it can do basically anything any other computer can do. This, loosely, is the basis of the great principle of ‚Universality‘.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.