In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

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.

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

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

We are going to transform Britain’s rail system from the worst in the world to the best. If you can do a few things like that, when the body gives out, you can say you’ve lived a good life.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

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.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

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

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

Life is about growing and improving and getting better.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

Love to everybody who is out there progressing and taking things to the next level.

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

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.

I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

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

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

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

I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

I’m not feeling very well – I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.

There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that’s rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.

I sincerely hope I can contribute to the progress there has been in relations between Jews and Catholics since the Second Vatican Council in a spirit of renewed collaboration.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.