As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought

I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.

If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.

Education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.

[Chuck's wife] was standing behind me at the time and she said, 'Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck.'

We are in a race between knowledge and catastrophe. If we keep track of what is important, never lower our standards or forget why we are here, we have the ability to determine the fate of the world.

Invention and entrepreneurship isn't about pure technology. Most people take whatever they see in front of them and relate it to something they understand. For at least ten years after Ford started building cars, people called them horseless carriages. It wasn't obvious to call it a car. They used to call the radio 'the wireless.' Innovation is much more about changing people and their perceptions and their attitudes and their willingness to accept change than it is about physics and engineering.