I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.

Everybody tells jokes, but we still need comedians.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

Never underestimate yourself

it is strange, is it not, how an accident of millimeter here, a millimeter there, makes one face so important.

You can't make up for lost time. You can only do better in the future.

The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did.

To me the most important thing is getting into a studio and making an album that is 12 or 14 amazing songs, getting up onstage, and making people happy by livening the rock.

Prayer begets Revival, which begets more prayer.

Show business can be an addiction. ... An audience would laugh at me one night, and I would chase that high for another three months.

One does not grow old until he believes he has more to look back on than he has to look forward to.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

I like to come up with the melodies, and I have a lot of ideas as far as structure goes.