We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

The wealth of information now available at the click of a finger amazes me.

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

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

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

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

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 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.

I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

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

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

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.

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.

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.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

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.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

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

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

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.

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

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

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

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.

There are no small accidents on this circuit.

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.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

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

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.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

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.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.

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

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

In my day, there were no vet video games.

I think there will be PCs at every price 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.

The Internet, man, is a beautiful thing.

The Internet is a toilet. It is.

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

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.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

Before I do a stunt, I have to make sure it is safe.

American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

My doorman is more important to me than any head of any company. He keeps us safe.