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.

E-governance is easy governance, effective governance, and also economic governance. E-governance paves the way for good governance.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

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.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

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.

The goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

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.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

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

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.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

You can’t be afraid to fail. It’s the only way you succeed – you’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

I love the 3D revolution. I love the technology today that continues to push the envelope, continues break the new ground, and continues to raise the bar.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof.

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

If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

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

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

California is not just the Golden State. We are also the Internet State.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.