Mark Hopkins was one of the truest and best men that ever lived. He had a keen analytical mind; was thoroughly accurate, and took general supervision of the books, contracts, etc. He was strictly the office man, and never bought or sold anything. I a...
The three short years I spent at Harvard, where I lived with excellent people, taught me not only that I must know how to choose my partners but also that choosing excellent partners is a skill you can learn. Obviously, when you spend time with the b...
I look at my annual budgets for everything and anything, and I look to see where I can save the most money on those items. Saving 30% to 50% buying in bulk - replenishable items from toothpaste to soup, or whatever I use a lot of - is the best guaran...
I do spend really focused time with my wife, my kids, grandkids, and so when I'm doing something or on a golf course, work has stopped. I'm not always thinking and working... I think a leader has to really be a balanced, whole and healthy person pers...
Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We appro...
Strength of 100 men? I'd probably just get mad and hurt somebody and end up in jail. I think invisibility would probably be the best thing. I could be like, 'You know what, let me just see what these folks are talking about over here.' Then you could...
Sometimes the person that is best for you is the person right under your nose. I wanted to have a girlfriend in high school, and I know I would have treated a girl well, but instead I was just friends with a lot of girls. They ended up telling me lat...
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention o...
So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with - born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch this with our fingers. An...
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhap...
Someone will say, 'Well, that's good enough.' As soon as I hear 'Good enough,' it really bothers me. I spend as much time as I think I can on anything I do. I try to do that with the people that work with me. I try to get the best out of them.
I made a lot of money. I earned a lot of money with CNN and satellite and cable television. And you can't really spend large sums of money, intelligently, on buying things. So I thought the best thing I could do was put some of that money back to wor...
The post office doesn't guarantee delivery, but it tries really hard. It's called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box, they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. So, that means that t...
I had a dream about you. You were in the oil business, and I sold icy roads for a living. You didn’t understand who’d buy such a thing, and I said you didn’t understand how earmarks get slipped in Congressional bills.
If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proven theorems? Why don't we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we'll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millio...
I had done everything I could do as an astronaut, and we have a long line of inexperienced astronauts waiting for their first missions, and so my role really should be to step aside and help them prepare for their missions, rather than to try to get ...
I envision a day when a businesswoman will be having lunch, and then her phone will ring. When she opens it up, she will see an image of the latest Marc Jacobs coat that just arrived in stock. With a click of a button, she can purchase it and then fi...
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better...
Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you...
Three things about water affect almost all of cooking. First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mi...
Being in the public eye is part of what I do, and taking on a multitude of different projects - television, radio, fashion, writing or deep-sea diving - is a blessing. It is also how I pay my bills and fund my own skating, as I don't have a sponsor o...
