If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!

If we could create invention capitalism, that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do... We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things.

One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly.

What you do on a dinosaur expedition is you hike and look at the ground. You find bones sticking out of the dirt and, once you see something, you dig.

Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether.

My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.

One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.

Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.

Sooner or later the space program will need to save us by detecting and deflecting an incoming asteroid.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

We collectively have a special place in our heart for the manned space flight program - Apollo nostalgia is one element, but that is only part of it. American culture worships explorers - look at the fame of Lewis and Clark, for example. The American people want to think of themselves as supporting exploration.

The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.

It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.

Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.

A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.

The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'

The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.

We pay for content that we like, and we like the content we pay for. It's a lot more satisfying to pay $7.50 for Steven Spielberg's next epic than it is to watch my home movies for free. Even for me.

Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs.

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.

The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.

I'm one of the first invention capitalists.

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

Being a father has been, without a doubt, my greatest source of achievement, pride and inspiration. Fatherhood has taught me about unconditional love, reinforced the importance of giving back and taught me how to be a better person.

I am proud of my kids and happy to brag about their achievements. Their success has been an immense source of happiness for me.

Success doesn't necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won't win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling.

The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can't be easily defined in zeros and ones.

A person who sees a problem is a human being; a person who finds a solution is visionary; and the person who goes out and does something about it is an entrepreneur.

Success is not about how much money we have in the bank, but it's about how many peoples' lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things which are never done before.

We are now living in a fast paced technological era where every skill that we teach our children becomes obsolete in the 10 to 15 years due to exponentially growing technological advances.

If there is one thing I have learned on this incredible journey we call life, it is this: the sign of a truly successful individual is humility.

Stay focused on the mission.

The real metric of success isn't the size of your bank account. It's the number of lives in whom you might be able to make a positive difference.

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

The digital revolution has also meant a revolution in access to information. This puts more power and knowledge into the hands of nonexperts.

In life, we all struggle and strive to make progress. When will you know you've reached success? A billion dollars is a good sign, but there's a better one - humility.

Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before.

I think it's time we all agree that gender stereotypes are simply the confabulation of our own mind.

Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad.

Your initial idea may or may not work, but you have to remember that a failed idea is nothing but a stepping stone to a bigger success.

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.

We begin to change the world when we stimulate long-term prosperity using technology. There is not a problem that's large enough that innovation and entrepreneurship can't solve.