We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

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

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.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

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

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

I mean, we’ve built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it’s really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that’s what’s so amazing about the scale that it’s at today.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures – they’re lying if they say they haven’t. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind – the product wasn’t distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

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.

We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.

The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

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

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.

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

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

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

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

It’s safe to say headphones is a good business.

We don’t want to wait on someone to hire us and give us a check. We want to create our own opportunities.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.

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

I invented the cordless extension cord.

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.

Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

After ten years of word processing, I can’t even do hand writing anymore.

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game – if I put everything into the fight business – then I would eventually run the fight business.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

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

The Web and new technology offer more opportunities to reach a world market at a lower price. Today, a person can start a business at home and reach the world market.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

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.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‚Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number‘ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don’t have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

California has a special relationship with the Internet. Many of the core technologies that power the Internet were invented here. Many of the most successful online entrepreneurs and content creators – in business, the arts, and countless other endeavors – got their start here.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

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

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

I built a label at the same time I built a career.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

If you’re in this business and you are scared, then you better do something else.

Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‚over the Internet.‘

The microprocessor is a miracle.

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

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

I wasn’t born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained.

I’m a geek.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

I’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

From my very first day as an entrepreneur, I’ve felt the only mission worth pursuing in business is to make people’s lives better.

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

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.