In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

I don't need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster... carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

So [Polaroid's Dr. Edwin] Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don't understand why people like that can't be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be - not an astronaut, not a football player - but this.

I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do.

Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. On the importance of loving what you do.