The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.

People in the voting booth are not purely rational creatures any more than they're purely rational creatures outside the voting booth.

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.