Jeff Bezos

No business can continue to shrink. That can only go on for so long before irrelevancy sets in.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you__e competing against a lot of people. But if you__e willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you__e now competing against a fraction of those people_ Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue

Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.

The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.

I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

What we need to do is always lean into the future when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Strip malls are history.

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.