Steve Jobs

“The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.”

“That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be.”

“I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“That's my job - to make sure everything is great.”

“I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.”

“When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.”

“If you're afraid of failing you won't get very far”

“Strategy is figuring out what not to do.”

“We've demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don't let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don't allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”

“Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a culture shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.”

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”

“There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, Why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.”

“I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than ... intellectual, abstract understanding.”

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work”

“The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.”

“When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They'll want to do what's best for Apple, not what's best for them, what's best for Steve, or anybody else.”

“Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”

“I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.”

“The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.”

“I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.”

“Without passion, any rational person would give up!”

“We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.”

“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

“I don't mind if people don't like me. Well, I might a little ... but I really mind it when somebody uses their position at Time magazine to tell 10 million people they don't like me. I know what it's like to have your private life painted in the worst possible light in front of a lot of people.”

“Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”

“Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.”

“You know, I've got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can't say any more than that it's the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.”

“Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don't just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We're seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.”

“[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”

“You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.”

“People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done.”

“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.”

“If you want to hire great people and have them stay, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.”

“The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we've got to risk it, too.”

“Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction.”

“Everything is important- that success is in the details.”

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

“Sometimes life hits you like a brick in the face. Don't give up.”

“The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They're just like dead fish washing up on the shores.”

“Death is very likely the single best invention of life.”

“The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient ... But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

“It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.”

“I hate the way people use PowerPoints instead of thinking”

“But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.”

“Probably death is the best invention of life.”

“I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.”

“My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.”

“We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what's driven me.”