Eric Schmidt

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 isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.

A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't 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 it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's 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 doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.

I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.

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

I've 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 don't 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.

I used to say that you'll have 10 IP address on your body... and it looks like that's going to happen through medical monitoring.

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. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.

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.

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.

I've 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.

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

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

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

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

If you can't tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think.

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