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 drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

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

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

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.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

And you know, I’ve had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

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

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

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

Think off-center.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

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

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

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?

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

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.

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.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‚What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?‘

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.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

Of the various branches of electrical investigation, perhaps the most interesting and immediately the most promising is that dealing with alternating currents.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.