In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

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

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

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.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

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

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

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

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

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

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

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.

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

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.

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

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

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

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

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‚Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?‘ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

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

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

Think off-center.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.

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

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.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

To make headway, improve your head.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

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

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

We have to build the capacity of our institutions, employees and workers. Our regulatory environment has not been encouraging to research, innovation and enterprise.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

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