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.

As everything becomes digitized, there’s the idea that things that can’t be digitized become more valuable.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Young people can create beautiful things.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

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

If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can’t write every line of code. I can’t write any lines of code.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

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

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don’t check in code anymore.

Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn’t had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents‘ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It’s a speech-to-text program, and there’s an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

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

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.

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

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signaling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

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

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Imagination decides everything.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‚Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?‘ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

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.

MySpace is my wife… Facebook is my mistress.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Taking bold action on climate change simply makes good business sense. It’s also the right thing to do for people and the planet. Setting a net-zero GHG emissions target by 2050 will drive innovation, grow jobs, build prosperity, and secure a better world for what will soon be 9 billion people.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

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

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.

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

Think off-center.

My ultimate life dream project is my kids. My family.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

I invented the cordless extension cord.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

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

I pay attention to politics and technology.