You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.

I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.

New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question.

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate

I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care