It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things.

I only live for the future.

Even though you can't get along without your smartphone, there are not many essential services on your smartphone. They're mostly convenience; you could live without it. Essential means you die without it. A gadget that warns you're about to have a heart attack - that's essential. We're about to go into that phase with smartphones.

I think young people don't appreciate that when you're in your 70s, you'll lose patience for techie stuff and you may decide that you want a simple device.

Technology has to be invisible. Transparent. Just simple.

I'm at the doctor's office. I'm in the waiting room. And there's this guy on his cell phone, talking really loud. Does he think he owns the place? Apparently. I think this is so offensive. But you have to remember: It doesn't take a cell phone to make people rude. People were rude before there were cell phones.

The future of cellular telephony is to make people's lives better - the most important way, in my view, will be the opportunity to revolutionise healthcare.

Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.

I'm always trying whatever the latest telephone is.

We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin.

When you get involved in a startup, you have to be passionate.

The instruction manual for my Motorola phone is bigger and heavier than the phone.

There are all kinds of features that will become part of cell phones that will help us offload the more laborious things of life and let us focus on doing the things humans do well, like abstract thinking and creating.

I'd been taking things apart and inventing things since I was a little kid… I still have memories as a child trying to really understand how things work.

I have a mantra that people are naturally, fundamentally and inherently mobile.

The first cell phone model weighed over one kilo, and you could only talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran out. Which is just as well because you would not be able to hold it up for much longer.

I think what's really going to happen is we're going to have a lot of different kinds of phones when our industry grows up - some that are just plain, simple telephones. In fact, my wife and I started a company, and she designed the Jitterbug, which is just a simple telephone.

Of course I have an iPhone and I use that, interestingly enough, mostly for my calendar because it synchronizes with my calendar. I take pictures with it and I show people pictures of my grandchildren.

Just remember, in 1973, we had no digital cameras, no personal computers, no Internet. The thought of putting a billion transistors in a cell phone was ludicrous.

You have to immerse yourself into a product and use it in order to really understand it and that's why I have a new cellphone every month or two.

Just suppose that you could do a physical examination, not every year, which people do and which is almost worthless, but every minute, because you're connected, and because we have devices that you can put on your body that measure virtually everything on your body.

I had an iPhone for a while, I gave that to my grandson. Kids are really caught up in that.

I got a Motorola Droid that I use. I also have a Jitterbug.

I don't want to be the oldest anything in America. Sorry about that.

The optimum telephone is one that I think some day is gonna be embedded behind your ear. It's gonna have an extraordinarily powerful computer running the cell phone.

I think what is going to happen in the future is more customization, more personalization. We all are different and we ought to be able to customize and have a phone that does exactly what we want it to do - that is so easy to use that we don't even have to think about it. That's what the dream is.

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones.

We had no idea that things like Facebook and Twitter, and all these other concepts, would ever happen.

The more we learn about new communications, the more capacity we need, and that is going to keep going on forever. That's been happening since radio was invented, and that's going to keep going.

Bell Labs was a fantastic research organization but having them create and market new products for the world was terrible. They were not good marketers and yet it was AT&T engineers who were deciding what the products of the future were.

The notion that there's finite spectrum is mostly wrong.

Cellular was the forerunner to true wireless communications.

Just think of what a world it would be if we could measure the characteristics of your body when you get sick and transmit those directly to a doctor or a computer. You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly.

People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.

The biggest innovation of all is social networking, and cellular technology is the facilitator for social networking. People are mobile; social networking is people, and the only way people connect with each other is wirelessly.

I do like to get away from technology. I still read a lot. Having said that, most of my reading is on computers or a Kindle or an iPad.

When I go skiing, I may carry a phone, but it's there for safety purposes. I'm not one of these guys that reads his email while he's riding up on the chair lift.

The only thing I don't like is being called the 'grandfather of the cellphone' because that makes me a little older than I prefer to be.

Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.

Every two and a half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that's going to keep happening.

I use Verizon. My wife uses Cingular. I also have an AT&T phone for the car.

It doesn't take a cell phone to make a person rude. There are rude people all over the place. But people are learning. I have never heard a cell phone ring in the movies. We are going to learn how to live with the advantages of new technology.

The public doesn't adopt radical concepts very quickly.

I wouldn't use a phone with less than a 4-inch screen anymore.

I think an engineer has not matured until he or she has conceived of a product and participated in every stage of bringing it to fruition, if that makes sense. And not many engineers get to do all of those stages.

My wife has forced me to wear designer jeans, and I find... there must be two or three hundred different kinds of jeans you can wear, all of which are made out of denim and look roughly the same. People are different. They have different tastes, different bodies. Cellphones ought to be the same.

My rule is, if you want to build something that does all things for all people, it's not going to work real well.

We all know how tough children are with toys. It turns out grownups are much worse.

Cellular companies don't innovate, they just buy more spectrum.

I think projects often fail because people do not have a clear understanding at the start what they are trying to deliver.