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 cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?

Water is the softest of all things, yet it is the most powerful. The ocean patiently allows all things to flow into it. It is always flexible. The Tao is not about grasping, but allowing, like water.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

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.

Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, ‚Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.‘ You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

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

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States – and war is what they got.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

The most violent show on TV is the six o’clock news.

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don’t think it’s possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

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

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

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

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.

I’ve always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Once you have a computer that can do a few things – strictly speaking, one that has a certain ‚sufficient set‘ of basic procedures – it can do basically anything any other computer can do. This, loosely, is the basis of the great principle of ‚Universality‘.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

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

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.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

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.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

I’m not a futurist.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‚outside the box,‘ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

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

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

If that’s there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

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