Steve Jobs

“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.”

“You're ripping us off! I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!”

“Was George Orwell right about 1984?”

“We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.”

“It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans.”

“They're babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen.”

“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”

“I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I'm only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I've got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.”

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

“It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”

“Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities.”

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”

“It'll make your jaw drop.”

“It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.”

“<!-- Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?”

“What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

“My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple.”

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”

“We believe it's the biggest advance in animation since Walt Disney started it all with the release of Snow White 50 years ago.”

“If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt if I would have bought the company.”

“The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”

“[Miele] really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.”

“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 thoroughly understand something — chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”

“I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money.”

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

“I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.”

“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

“We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies [...] hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us.”