If you're too focused on your current business, it's hard to change and concentrate on innovating.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

Even when things are stable, that's not easy [to work in Africa] because there are not roads, and the weather is tough, the education system hasn't been there. But this is how you get great countries, is step by step.

If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.

For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.