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.

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.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

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

The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.

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.

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.

Loving others always costs us something and requires effort. And you have to decide to do it on purpose. You can’t wait for a feeling to motivate you.

What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.

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.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

Like every parent, when you start your family, your life completely changes. And you completely live for someone else. I find that the most extraordinary thing. Your life is handed over to someone else. From that moment on, they come first in every choice you make. It’s the most wonderful thing.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

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

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.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

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

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

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.

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.

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

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

As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

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

The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

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

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

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.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

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

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

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

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.

I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

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.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.