The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

It is our future on the line, and we must at least have a say in it.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

No one but a fool is always right.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I thank God I’m in a position where I can pick and choose – there are some roles I don’t play.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Leadership is influence.

The issues that cross a president’s desk are never easy. The easy questions don’t even get to the president.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

My business is to prevent the future.

I don’t want to express my opinion about actual politics, because if I do, I have to be responsible for my decision.

The more players I have, the more difficult choices there are for me, but the better it is for LFC.

Finding good partners is the key to success in anything: in business, in marriage and, especially, in investing.

Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I’m riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I’m riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park – no, I don’t wear the dreaded helmet then.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

When I was running training, we would fire a couple of leaders from every SEAL team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability – it was a question of their ability to listen.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.