Revolutionary Quotes

“It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.”

“Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”

“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.”

“The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.”

“Listen to me. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?”

“Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.”

“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've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet.”

“I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail.”

“Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

“I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we've just taken it.”

“Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.”

“We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from those that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late sixties and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.”

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

“You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.”

“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

“All we are is our ideas, or people. That's what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.”

“Let's make a dent in the universe”

“Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”

“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.”

“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 really care about being right, I just care about success. I don't mind being wrong, and I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”

“My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.”