All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better

... Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.

In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.

You can't spend as much money as I have, even if you try. I've been trying.

When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.

I greatly admire GE, their utterly ruthlessly focused management, to get the cost out and get this integration done.’ Okay, we may make a few mistakes along the way but we are not going to waste any time.' They make decisions; they are incredibly disciplined and focused.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."