There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Take advantage of the years of pioneering efforts. You might find this boring, as the young want to rush head on, as it were.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

We have to build the capacity of our institutions, employees and workers. Our regulatory environment has not been encouraging to research, innovation and enterprise.

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.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Small aim is a crime; have great aim.

A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.

My success rate speaks for itself.

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

I had a lot of success from the start. I never really was tested for long periods of time. I got my first professional job while I was a senior in college. I signed with the William Morris Agency before I graduated.

Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands.

Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

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.

Football is a team game and none can survive or excel without the help of the other.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

You want to know whether we’re better off? I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

People will visit Mars, they will settle mars, and we should because it’s cool.

If someone has a really great boyfriend or career, I think, it’s cool that happens.

The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven’t had that fear.

If I’m a star, then the people made me a star.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

I always try to be smart. I try to treat all the money I’m making like it’s the last time I’m going to make it.

There is little success where there is little laughter.

What you are comes to you.

People want to feel hopeful.

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

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.

Think and grow rich.

I suppose your security is your success and your key to success is your fine palate.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

Ability is nothing without opportunity.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

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

My father was a negative person. He actually taught me to be negative, if that makes any sense. I remember him saying: ‚You know there’s no point in expecting anything good to happen because it won’t.‘ I grew up in such a negative atmosphere.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it’s a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

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.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.