When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful." And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

If you depend on a single industry, if you don't continuously upgrade it, if that industry is not producing real wealth, if it's simply shuffling paper from here to here in a very efficient manner sometimes, that's not enough and that's not where you begin to get the rest of your jobs.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.

The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.

The thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.

Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.

There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.