We’re already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

I’m an iPod person.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

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.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

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.

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.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore – everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don’t. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

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

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

There’s no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.

E-governance is easy governance, effective governance, and also economic governance. E-governance paves the way for good governance.

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 was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

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.

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

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

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

We have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well.

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

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

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.

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

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

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.

How do people relate to movies now, when they’re on portable devices or streaming them? It’s not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

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

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

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‚The Most Powerful Idea in the World.‘

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice – if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

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.