Larry Page Quotations

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.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

I really like using my Samsung (005930:KS) tablet. I previously used the Motorola Xoom for a while and liked that.

We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we're doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that.

If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning.

Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.

Lots of companies don't succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that's not going to promote healthiness.

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job - that just doesn't make any sense to me. That can't be the right answer.

Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful.

If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.

We don't have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.

Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn't know where you are. It doesn't know what you're doing. It doesn't know what you know.

It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance.

For me, privacy and security are really important. We think about it in terms of both: You can't have privacy without security.

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.

We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.

We have a mantra: don't be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.

You may think using Google's great, but I still think it's terrible.

Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.

I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus.

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I've tried to really stress that.

Over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, predictable earnings rather than larger and less predictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.

Many companies have suffered from unreasonable speculation, small initial share float, and boom-bust cycles that hurt them and their investors in the long run. We believe that an auction-based IPO will minimize these problems.

Latin America is one of the fastest growing Internet communities in the world,

Our company relies on having the trust of our users and using that information for that benefit. That's a very strong motivation for us. We're committed to that. If you start to mandate how products are designed, I think that's a really bad path to follow. I think instead we should have laws that protect the privacy of data, for example, from government requests and other kinds of requests.

We really don't think about it that way. We're trying hard to find user needs that aren't being met at all.

We are targeting innovation. We believe mobile applications are essential.

There's lots of technology you can use to deal with those issues. There might be an adult section, or something like that. I don't think that is going to be a big issue.

This amendment would actually grant one company an unregulated monopoly.

This is the best day of my life. It's better than prom. It's better than anything in high school. It's better than getting accepted into college.

If you have a product that's really gaining a lot of usage, then it's probably a good idea.

The dream as conceived 25 years ago has not been achieved. Until software becomes the ultimate tool for collaboration, productivity, and efficiency, the work is not done. And there's nothing more fun than doing that work.

This is a historic meeting of established and new media.

The ultimate search engine, ... would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

The key to these things is making (the entire package) work seamlessly.

You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby.

Always deliver more than expected.

It's very hard to fail completely, if you aim high enough.

Optimism is important. You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned in college called, 'having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not do.

You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people.

If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things.

Our goal is long-term growth in revenue and absolute profit.. so we invest aggressively in future innovation while tightly managing our short-term costs.

Find the leverage in the world so you can be truly lazy.

Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting

I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research.

For a lot of companies, it's useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe it's better to shoot higher. You don't want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what's possible and how to make the world better.

You treat people with respect, they tend to return the favor to the company.

It is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. ... Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.

I feel like my job as CEO is always to be pushing people ahead.

Small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

You can be serious without a suit

The moments that we have with friends and family, the chances that we have to make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love, all those wonderful chances that life gives us, life also takes away. It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.

Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I've pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.

We understand the need to balance our short- and longer-term needs because our revenue is the engine that funds all our innovation. But over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.

You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.

You're probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm.

We have always believed that it's possible to make money without being evil.

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It's hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart from some banner advertising. We felt the exact opposite: that search quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly make money.

You need to get one thing done well, or else you don't have permission to do anything else.

Almost everyone who has had an idea that's somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they're insane.

Anything you can imagine probably is doable, you just have to imagine it and work on it.

You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges.

We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

People are starving in the world, not because we don't have enough food, but because we're not organized. And computers are part of that.

You don't need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea.

We should be building great things that don't exist

Technology should do the hard work so people can do the things that make them the happiest in life.

Most of us carry at least one device, all the time, every day. In fact many of us would feel naked without our smartphone. It's hardly surprising mobile search queries - and mobile commerce - are growing dramatically across the world.

Sergey and I founded Google because we're super optimisitc about the potential for technology to make the world a better place. Think about how many people are underserved by transportation today, like those with disabilities, and how self driving cars will transform their lives. Or the wasted time you sit in your car every day commuting to and from work. Or the deaths and injuries that could be avoided.

If we are not trusted, we have no business.

Don't be evil- apparently people like it better than "Be good".

I remember turning in my first assignment in elementary school using the computer and the teachers were kind of confused that I had printed it.

The Web is a vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous documents.

Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work.

There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions.

...It's important to distinguish between "worry versus harm" when it came to privacy online.

Over time, it's becoming more and more understood by people that we're acting in their interests. And that's a very, very powerful thing for our brand.

Being negative is not how we make progress, and the most important things are not zero sum,

Technology should do the hard work, so you can get on and live your life. We're only at one percent of what's possible, and we're moving slow relative to the opportunity we have.

We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.

We really care about our brand. We really want it to stand for high quality. We want people to be excited about it, for it to be fun.

If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.

As we transition from one screen to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and drive ever higher monetization. Just like Search in 2000.

How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?

We should be focusing on building things that do not exist.