I’m not a futurist.

We believe that within five years, 96 percent of British consumers will have access to the Internet, whether it be through a personal computer, a set-top box or a mobile phone.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Computers double their performance every month.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.

I don’t write letters anymore.

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

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

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

Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

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

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

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

If I went out to play basketball with other kids, when I came home I’d shower and go right back to the computer again. If there was a birthday party or a family activity, I would take my laptop and spend the whole day there.

You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.

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

I’m a geek.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore – everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don’t. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

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.

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

The reason we wouldn’t make a seven-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit a price point, it’s because we don’t think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.

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!

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

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

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

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

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

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.

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

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

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.

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.

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

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

Everybody is entertained to death.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Everybody around me had a Snapchat, and I said I would never get on it. I’m still on Instagram, you know? They convinced me to get Snapchat.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.