There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

I’m glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That’s cool.

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

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.

Fashion has become so whatever. I don’t think there are any stones left to unturn.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Young people can create beautiful things.

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.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

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.

Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

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

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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

After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn’t even go to the classes.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.

We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones – apart from the iPhone – can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into ‚Facebook phones.‘ That’s what Facebook Home is.

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

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

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

It’s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we’ve had some very serious ups and downs.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.

I’m not a futurist.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

Research is creating new knowledge.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

The length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.

Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

I’m interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you’re like, ‚Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?‘

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.