Top 88 Eric Schmidt Quotes

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

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.

The policy of America to deny visas to technically trained people in the U.S. and shipped to other countries, where they create companies that compete with America, has to be the stupidest policy of all the U.S. government policies.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.

The funny thing about advertising is that it’s not a zero-sum game… Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it’s possible for everyone to win, and it’s perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.

We want to make sure the thing you’re looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.

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.’

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

Fast learners win.

Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.

Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.

Google’s architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve.

Half of Google’s revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

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.

People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.

Google docs and spreadsheets don’t work if you’re on an airplane. But it’s a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.

Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.

There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.

Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.

Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it’s always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn’t mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.

The funny thing about advertising is that it’s not a zero-sum game… Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it’s possible for everyone to win, and it’s perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.

Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.

In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we’re in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that’s the secret of Google.

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.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.

In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we’re in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that’s the secret of Google.

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.’

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.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that’s the best use of my time.

I do want to emphasize that we’ve seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it’s why we’re all here. And the ability to see what’s really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.

Silicon Valley’s involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully – who was the CEO of Apple – had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we’re all going, like, ‘What’s going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?’

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.

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.

I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It’s a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search… I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.

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.

The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.

Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there’s an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.

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.

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.

We weren’t here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win.

I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.