We have no idea how far it’s going to go. 

Humans are tool builders. We create things to amplify ourselves. The computer will rank at the top -it’s the most awesome tool ever.

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

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on

I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think.

Talking about bicycles: Human are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We actually ran an ad like this early at Apple that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.

It is the most awesome tool that we ever invented (the computer). And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this invention has taken form.

A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a super calculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.

Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they’ll be doing more and more for us.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

On how will the Web impact our society: We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less.

I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers.

We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.

I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.

They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.

One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.

The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.

I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.

It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.

Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process.

The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas

People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.

The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.

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.

You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

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

You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.

We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.

Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time.

Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.

I started to listen to music a whole lot and I started to read more outside of just science and technology, Shakespeare, Plato. I loved ‘King Lear’.

Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.

On why he made everybody sign the Mac cases: Because the people that worked on it consider themselves and I certainly consider them artists. These are the people that under different circumstances would be painters and poets but because of that time that we live in this new medium has appeared in which to express oneself to one’s fellow species and that’s a medium of computing.

How do you know the direction to head with products? It boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.

A lot of people that would have been artists and scientists have gone into this field to express their feeling and so it seemed like the right thing to do.

The key thing that comes true is that they had a variety of experiences which they could draw upon, in order to try to solve a problem or to attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way.

Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist.