Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

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

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

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.

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

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

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

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

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.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

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

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

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

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

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

California has a special relationship with the Internet. Many of the core technologies that power the Internet were invented here. Many of the most successful online entrepreneurs and content creators – in business, the arts, and countless other endeavors – got their start here.

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

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.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.

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.

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

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

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

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

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.

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark.

You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn’t in place.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.

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.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

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.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

I am excited to partner with Under Armour to bring game-changing sleepwear, with the same bioceramics technology I use, to athletes all around the world.

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

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Young people can create beautiful things.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

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

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.