If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

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

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

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

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

The buck stops here!

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

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.

We will explore the mysteries of science and harness the power of technology and innovation. We will realise the opportunities of the digital world. Our youth will learn more from – and with – each other.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it’s a well run institution – say, Goldman Sachs – it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

Think off-center.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

I don’t believe in signing anything and everything that comes my way. I leave it to my agency to help narrow them down for me, but I do research it myself before signing. The image of the brand and its ambassadors go hand in hand.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life.

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.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I’m taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

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.

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

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.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, ‚If you don’t know how to make the right decision, you’re not a director.‘

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

I wasn’t born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained.

The first time I stepped on an NBA court I became a businessman.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

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.

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

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

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

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

Solutions are not the answer.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

A wet spot on the floor kind of put a scare in myself, so you never know inside those lines what might happen.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

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

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

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!

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.