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

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

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

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

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

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

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

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

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

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there’s always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

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.

California is not just the Golden State. We are also the Internet State.

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

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

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.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television.

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

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

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.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

Facebook are an amazing team, a brilliant team. It’s a technology that brings people together.

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.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

Electronic books are junk.

We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn’t where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, ‚Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?‘ And we actually agreed with that.

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 had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

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

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Connectivity is a human right.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

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.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.