I invented the cordless extension cord.

Think off-center.

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

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

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

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.

A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Democracy is not static. It is a living force. Every new idea, every new invention offers opportunity for both good and evil.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

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.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

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.

We’re already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

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

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

Of the various branches of electrical investigation, perhaps the most interesting and immediately the most promising is that dealing with alternating currents.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

In this experiment, made on the 9th of October, 1876, actual conversation, backwards and forwards, upon the same line, and by the same instruments reciprocally used, was successfully carried on for the first time upon a real line of miles in length.

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.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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

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.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

I really wanted to break the mold of what modern touring is right now.

There’s no point in starting a business unless you’re going to make a dramatic difference to other people’s lives. So if you’ve got an idea that’s gonna make a big difference to other people’s lives, then just get on and do it.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

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

I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

I do think there should be some regulations on AI.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

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

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.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

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

Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

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.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

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

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

The Internet is a big distraction.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users‘ experience.

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.