I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

I know there’s a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that’s fine with me.

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.

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

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

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

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.

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

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.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

I’m not a futurist.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore – everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don’t. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

People don’t want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.

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

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.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process.

The world has today 546 nuclear plants generating electricity. Their experience is being continuously researched, and feedback should be provided to all. Nuclear scientists have to interact with the people of the nation, and academic institutions continuously update nuclear power generation technology and safety.

I’m a geek.

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

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‚The Most Powerful Idea in the World.‘

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

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

It’s no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‚play‘ with them!

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it’s still being invented; we’re still trying to work out how it works. There’s a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn’t recognise. It’s time for the machines to disappear. The computer’s got to disappear into all of the things we use.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.

It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

It’s easier to add things on to a PC than it’s ever been before. It’s one click, and boom, it comes down.

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.

I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that’s odd, but I think it’s odd if artists aren’t interested in the world around them. I’m always chasing that.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement – it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

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.