One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‚We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.‘

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

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.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they’re in another country.

Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

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.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I worked for Xerox for 4 years and after that I knew I was never going to be a corporate person. It wasn’t my environment.

Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else’s. I’m not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I’m all about.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

To innovate is not to reform.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

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

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.

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.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

Without tact you can learn nothing.

I’m not a futurist.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

Cameras aren’t guns. They can’t really hurt you.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

I know there’s a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that’s fine with me.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

I love good, loud speakers.

There’s no point in starting a business unless you’re going to make a dramatic difference to other people’s lives. So if you’ve got an idea that’s gonna make a big difference to other people’s lives, then just get on and do it.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.