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Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.
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You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.
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The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work...
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When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.
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There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.
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Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.
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I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we've been together ever since.
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I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with fifty average people.
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Be ready to catch the ball when it is thrown by life.
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So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'
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If you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.
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The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They're just like dead fish washing up on the shores.
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The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place.
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Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.
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I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.
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I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and... it wasn't that important — because I never did it for the money.
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I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
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The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.
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I try to get people to see what I have. . . . When you run a computer company, you have to get people to buy into your dreams.
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The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.
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My teacher basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.
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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.
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Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?
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Woz is living his own life now. He hasn't been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.