Top 101 Paul Allen Quotes

Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven’t thought about before. A lot of times, I’m asking myself – ‘This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn’t been done?’

To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.

I just try to stuff my brain with everything that I can read on what is going on in science at a very high level, and sometimes I see connections of what might need to be done.

You look at things you enjoy in your life, but much more important is what you can do to make the world a better place.

Blame me for having to type the backslash in DOS.

In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from ’60 to ’82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.

The NBA is intense, but the NFL is a whole ‘nother level of intensity and dramatic, game-changing plays.

The thing is, once you’re in the Super Bowl, you want to win. As time goes on, you want to win more and more.

I was a programmer.

What people don’t realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do – by millions of years of evolution – what we do.

Your dream, when you buy a sports franchise, is to win the championship, the Super Bowl.

Moore’s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

I’ve lived in Boston.

I have held Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that’s the extent of it.

Human beings are fragile things, and for the period of time it takes to get them to Mars and back, you have dangerous radiation from the sun and the galaxy. We have to think about issues like that.

Sports is such a cyclical thing; it’s often feast or famine. But what you try and do as an owner is build a winning organization.

Whenever you make the Super Bowl, so many things – you have to have the good general manager and the coach and the great players, and you have to have not too many injuries – everything, game plans and everything, has to fall very much your way for that to happen.

I’m on Twitter, and I have over 10,000 followers. Which is pretty modest compared to Charlie Sheen.

If you have the chance to realize some of these dreams you had as a kid, and you have the opportunity, why not pursue that?

AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before.

Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn’t one of them.

I choose optimism. I hope to be a catalyst not only by providing financial resources but also by fostering a sense of possibility: encouraging top experts to collaborate across disciplines, challenge conventional thinking, and figure out ways to overcome some of the world’s hardest problems.

I am generally fascinated by what are the big, challenging questions – that’s behind my curiosity.

At one point, I was the youngest owner in major league sports.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

I enjoy creating new ideas, working on new creative projects.

In the computer industry, you’ve got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.

As a species, we’ve always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore’s law.

I’m not somebody that just has one or two things in life that are laserlike focused.

Artificial intelligence… I’ve been following that since I was in high school.

I’m a very private person that prefers a low profile.

I think, as an owner, you really want to do the team right, the fans right, and the community right and build a winning organization.

I have had some amazing experiences as a musician – even with my modest skills.

No one knows the complete function of sleep. Is it to reset the brain or give it more of a rest period? Is it for cleaning the brain of all the garbage protein? For me, talking about these things as a non-biologist is fascinating.

As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.

I really do care about the health of the players. That’s one of the tough things about the NFL – it’s so physically tough on the players.

Traditionally, Seattle has been a great sports town and great football town. What the Huskies have achieved over the years has been pretty amazing. That’s how I got my first taste of football – when I went with my father to Husky Stadium.

I believe in the power of shared data and technology to help build a better future.

I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like ‘Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II’ when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.

The biggest yacht that I have accommodates a submarine.

Something that is characteristic of me is the breadth of my interests.

If you think about making a difference in the community, my family has always had a strong interest in the arts. I’m always interested in finding ways to innovate… It’s a blend; it’s not a point focus.

In the early days at Asymetrix, we were focusing on business automation.

In my own work, I’ve tried to anticipate what’s coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people’s lives in a meaningful way.

Of course I love basketball.

Microprocessors were instantly attractive to us because you could build something for a fraction of the cost of conventional electronics. That’s essentially what we did with the Traf-O-Data computer – only it was too narrow and challenging an area to try to build a service business in.

Art fairs bring attention to up and coming artists and some amazing new works. They are a way to connect everyone with what’s happening at the cutting edge of art, both new and historic.

In an ideal world, everybody would find it easy to talk to the press… but not everybody is so excited.

Long periods can pass between the times you play for a championship, so you have to savor those moments.

When I was 7 or 8, I became fascinated with hot rods.

I just try to find things that either need to be done, should be done, or where I can make a difference in a significant way. And the things I’ve been able to participate in have been very, very exciting.

As a programmer, you’re working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

When it comes to helping out, I don’t believe in doing it for the media attention. My goal is to support the organizations that need help.

I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft – that’s always going to be something I’m known for.

The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.

Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There’s so much yet to be discovered.

I remember having pizza at Shakey’s in Vancouver, Washington in 1973 and talking about the fact that eventually, everyone is going to be online and have access to newspapers and stuff, and wouldn’t people be willing to pay for information on a computer terminal.

There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.

I’m kind of a retired software engineer. I don’t write code anymore.

There’s a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they’ve all fallen short.

General managers – I like to talk about the ‘golden gut’: general managers that not only can have a sense for the players that are going to perform beyond what people expect and get team chemistry right, but they also have to be able to make trades.

The NFL, as compared to the NBA, it’s so physical and so emotional almost every play.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn’t a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later.

From my youth, I’d never stopped thinking in the future tense.

Computers are really, basically, computing elements and a lot of memory. They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.