If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

Change the boundaries of business.

Whenever there is hard work to be done, I assign it to the laziest man as he is sure to find an easy way of doing it. Be lazy, think crazy.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.