We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

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

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

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

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

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.

I’m an iPod person.

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.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

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

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

What is past is prologue.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

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

I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the ‚Dust and Ashes Act,‘ any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

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.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

It’s easier to add things on to a PC than it’s ever been before. It’s one click, and boom, it comes down.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

I love the freedom of movement that my phone gives me. That has definitely transformed my life.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

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 don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

Electronic books are junk.

Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

FaceTime helps me a lot. I feel like I’m at home even though I’m not.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.