An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

Apple is in a position they've been in a lot of times before. They're like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there.

Virtually every real breakthrough in technology had a bubble which burst, left a lot of people broke who'd invested in it, but also left the infrastructure for this next golden age, effectively.

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.

I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.

The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.

I guess I would just say that in general, one of my weaknesses is that I love everything. There's too much of everything to keep up with it all. I get bored with Silicon Valley technology a lot. I've always had much more of a draw to the people who are doing things for love than the people who are doing things for money.

One of the big changes at the heart of Web 2.0 is the shift from the creation of software artifacts, which is what the PC revolution was about, to the creation of software services. These are services that ultimately, if they are successful, will require competencies of operation, of scale, and the like.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

I see publishers bemoaning their fate and saying that this is the end of publishing. No! Publishers will recreate themselves. Some of that comes from my experience as a print publisher.

I wanted more control of my life. I wanted work to fit in, not to dominate; to support, not to lead the pattern of my life.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature of advertising.

We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.

I believe people are fundamentally good and want to find things that make life better for themselves. There are social dynamics for people that work, and there are ones that are pathological. But beneath every 'no' lays a 'yes' that had never been broken. I put my life-faith in that.

I like to think that even if we make some really bad choices and go down some bad paths, we'll eventually emerge from it.

I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.

I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.

Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful, and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive.

I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.

I'd love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

We want to show how technology can be applied to fix our problems. We need to celebrate not just success but to celebrate people who make a difference. It starts with people who do things for love, with no expectation of return. Some of that turns into enormous financial success, and then some of it goes back into doing it for love.

At O'Reilly, the way we think about our business is that we're not a publisher; we're not a conference producer; we're a company that helps change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

If you are extremely well known and have a very desirable product, then yes, you probably do suffer a bit from piracy, in the same way that if you make a lot of money, you pay more in taxes than if you don't make any money.

One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.

The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I'm a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.

A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government.

It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.