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

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they’re in another country.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

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.

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

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

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

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.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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

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

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

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.

I love the 3D revolution. I love the technology today that continues to push the envelope, continues break the new ground, and continues to raise the bar.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.

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

Health is certainly extremely important, and we’ve done a number of things at Facebook to help improve global health and work in that area, and I am excited to do more there, too. But the reality is that it’s not an either-or. People need to be healthy and be able to have the Internet as a backbone to connect them to the whole economy.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

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.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

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.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

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

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Young people can create beautiful things.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

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.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.