Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

Leonardo da Vinci was comfortable being illegitimate, gay, a misfit, a heretic. But he also respected other people. He didn't get into disputations. He was a genius but he had a certain humility. In his notebooks you see lists of people he wanted to grill about things like how the water diversions in Milan work; he was always interested in learning from other people.

You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom.

I think America is really well-positioned, because we do train people to be creative and sometimes resist authority, which helps in being an innovator. I think you're going to see for the next phase of the revolution all sorts of wonderful ways of connecting art and literature and journalism into new forms of digital expression.