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

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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

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.

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.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

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

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

The Internet is a big distraction.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

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

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

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

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users‘ experience.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.

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

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution – this revolution – is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

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

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

You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

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

The Web and new technology offer more opportunities to reach a world market at a lower price. Today, a person can start a business at home and reach the world market.

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.

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

Cameras aren’t guns. They can’t really hurt you.

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.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

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.

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‚Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number‘ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

I’m a geek.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.

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

Even more amazing than modern technology is our opportunity to access information directly from Heaven, without hardware, software, or monthly service fees.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

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

Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

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

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.