Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

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.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

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

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

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

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

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.

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 have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

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.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

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.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

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.

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

I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

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

We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

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.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Originality is really important.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

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.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

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.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work – not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

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 goal of Tesla is to accelerate sustainable energy, so we’re going to take a step back and think about what’s most likely to achieve that goal.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

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

Think off-center.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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.

I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It’s a speech-to-text program, and there’s an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

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?

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.