The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

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.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

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.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

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

I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

I’m not no Internet person.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

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.

You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Everybody around me had a Snapchat, and I said I would never get on it. I’m still on Instagram, you know? They convinced me to get Snapchat.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.

While I have never learned to use a computer, I am surrounded by family and friends who carry information to me from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and various websites.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

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.

You don’t have to turn on the TV set. You don’t have to work on the Internet. It’s up to you.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

You have a nice personality, but not for a human being.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

I think right now it’s a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers, and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‚Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number‘ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

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?

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.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

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.

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.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

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.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

I don’t think people are going to talk in the future. They’re going to communicate through eye contact, body language, emojis, signs.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.