Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

My hope is that we're going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.

I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'

You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today's world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one's watching, whether it's an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see.

Eight billion people will have Internet access by 2020.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they'll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.

I don't think the space station is innovative. Going to the moon was innovative because we had no idea how to do it.

In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!

My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news.