No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

Humans often come together by believing in ideas that may only exist in our imaginations. 50 years ago, talking to somebody on the other side of the world with a device that fits in your hand, walking on the moon, or sending a rocket to Pluto would have been beyond our realities and could only have been possible with magic.

In postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.

There's just enough in your control where you think you should be able to perform or deliver on any given day – but when you really sit and think about it, you're basically trying to be predictive text for the ocean.

Smell is an outlier. The brain essentially sent out a little tentacle into the world, those nerve fibres are the only contact between the central nervous system and the external world. This is the point at which there is no barrier between the brain and the outside world.

If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?

I used to keep a pair of lizards in an aquarium and fed them live crickets. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I didn't believe crickets had any inner life at all. But now I wonder if I was actually creating the worst moments of their existence by feeding them to my lizards.

One of the unique aspects of a prize, and particularly an X-Prize, is that it doesn't require letters after your name, specific degrees or backgrounds or so on. We simply define what it is we want solved, and award the prize to whomever is able to accomplish that.

Connection is not a nice to have. When we lose the right kinds of connections with others, we start to feel we don't exist.

The more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher it. Success makes you a target. It makes you something worth capturing

When it comes to acquisitions, many people jump straight to analyzing the financial returns. I approach it differently. I start by asking: How will our customers benefit from this acquisition?

The best analogy I can give for an IPO is that it's like a wedding. There's a whole lot of attention directed toward the wedding, and less toward the 20 years of marriage after the wedding. IPO has the word initial in it, it's the starting line for being a public company.