Quotes by Eric Schmidt

“All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.”

“The Internet is the Viagra of big business.”

A mind set in its ways is wasted. Dont do it.

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that its a given the role for which youre hiring is going to change. Yesterdays widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesnt have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.

There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isnt true. If yoy want to change peoples behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.

Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who do not usually know whats supposed to be impossible.

If you cant tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesnt understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They dont just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didnt know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, I must have it.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

Your car should drive itself. Its amazing to me that we let humans drive cars... Its a bug that cars were invented before computers.

People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.

Ive come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.

There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. Its constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.

I used to say that youll have 10 IP address on your body... and it looks like thats going to happen through medical monitoring.

Ive never met a person who does not want a safer world, better medical care and education for their children, and peace with their neighbours. I just dont meet those people. What I meet, over and over again, as I travel around, is that the essential human condition is optimistic - in every one of these places.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, its all about time compression and making the globe smaller. Its had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So were much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

I dont believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.