Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.

“What one man can invent, another can discover.”

"When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It's usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation."

"I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved."

"What makes innovative thinking happen?... I think it's really a mindset. You have to decide."

"There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions."

"Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell."

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

The biggest threat to innovation is internal politics and an organizational culture, which doesn’t accept failure and/or doesn’t accept ideas from outside, and/or cannot change.

"We need to have service offerings associated with each of our products that allow us to feed innovations that are appropriate to the market on, let's just call it a six-, probably more realistically a nine-month cycle,"

"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."

"We need the next generation to be motivated and to push technological boundaries, to seek out new innovations."

"The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars."

"With his deeds, not only words, President Obama has revitalized our struggling space program."

"There should be an international lunar base. That is certainly doable."

"America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond."

"There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again."

"Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar inspected, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked, and even laser blasted."

"What's aero braking? That's a way to use the gravity and upper atmosphere of Earth to sling shot a ship out either deeper into space, or slow it down to be 'captured' by Earth's gravity."

"When you're in a spacecraft, you need to know what things you can touch and what things you shouldn't touch!"

"I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface."

“Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.”