Steve Wozniak Quotations

Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.

When I have spare time, I catch up on things I've had to postpone due to lack of time.

I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.

Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn't thought of before and that aren't talked about in the news all the time.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

I just believe that the way that young people's minds develop is fascinating. If you are doing something for a grade or salary or a reward, it doesn't have as much meaning as creating something for yourself and your own life.

When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

I wish to God that Apple and Google were partners in the future,

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.

Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right.

I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that

Although I receive a small salary from Apple, I do virtually no real work at the company.

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.

My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24 / 7.

I don't know why because I'm nice to him, so there must have been something he didn't like.

I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.

But it was kind of fun to have a company, and that was good enough reason to do it. And step by step, boy, it was right timing. Computers were exploding and we were in it exactly at the right time.

We totally failed on the software applications for it. It went to the stores and everything that sold as the hottest newest thing came back. It didn't work. It wouldn't even turn on anymore.

Steve and I ran the business into 1977 with just a few hundred bucks.

It disturbed me quite a bit when young children had to get on the evacuation buses and leave their pets behind, ... Pets are a part of your family, at least in my opinion. I have five dogs of my own and they're my family. I can't imagine having to leave them behind.

When I designed projects in college, he said, let's sell it.

You have to think offensively and defensively and see where your opponent is going to go. Your mind has to be totally aware of the whole situation. That doesn't come the first time you play.

There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don't know if Samsung would stop us.

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know 'No, he couldn't have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.'

Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.

All of a sudden, we needed something like $250,000, so we had to go out and pursue the company in a whole different aspect, and we found somebody who was willing to put their money in.

The Mac's a symbol of a whole revolution, and most of us that participated in it from the beginning and believed in it bought into these new ideals of computers to really help people, and not something that you had to fight, memorize and learn, ... That whole revolution just continues in our hearts to this day.

My primary phone is the iPhone. I love the beauty of it. But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do.

I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

I hate to say it, and Apple never likes it, but I love anything that's hacker oriented. I don't like passing it onto others, or getting things for free. I don't like stealing music one bit, at all ...

I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

Pretty much I want to be Steve Wozniak, who I decided I was at a young age and not change. I want to go back to school and get my college degree like I would have without Apple.I want to teach young kids like I would have without Apple. And part of it is I'm accessible. I'm open. And so many people e-mail me and get me. And as much as I can I try to answer people, listen to them, be polite and say yes.

I wanted to be an elementary school teacher my whole life.

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone...

Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.

When you're providing a service to somebody, you're the guy they always call when something's wrong.

My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.

I was born to teach. I have always had this gift with children.

I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn't see a music device as having any importance at all,he sees music itself to a person as a being the important thing.

I don't think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he's kind of managing companies and every day he's working making sure this is in place and that's in place.

I just believe in whatever you're going to do, even if it's work, have a little bit of fun attitude about it. You can be happy.

I don't believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.

All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,’ he said. ‘We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God…

I wanted to be funny. And I'm always acknowledged for my pranks and jokes nowadays.

All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.

I am the person I want to be. I got to teach and had some of the greatest times in my life learning that I had some teaching skills and doing some incredible things teaching 200 hours of computers a year to fifth graders, making them experts at certain things.

The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I'm going to San Antonio, for example, I'll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it.

And Communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them.

All through time in Apple products, even from our very first ones, that's how he [ Steve Jobs] looked at the world, that you don't really want a piece of technology, a certain type of chip. What you want is a solution to a problem in life, some cause, some issue that you want in your life that'll help you. And it's how do you make that almost one step - say it and it happens.

Not everything in life can go perfectly according to plan. I mean I didn't keep every girlfriend I ever had.

I really worry about everything going to the cloud,

Being an electronic genius was a reputation I had, maybe being even into math and science almost exclusively and not wanting to be in the other normal parts of the world.

For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.

I have such a crowded life and crowded schedule. When people send me a link with a gadget, I'll look at it and buy it if it looks interesting, but I don't have time to check out everything I'd like to.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

I'm also a fan with sticking with the most standard software that millions of other users also use, because you get the benefit of all those other users' problems and solutions.

Every dream I've ever had in life has come true ten times over.

I never got into Linux. I swear to God, it's only lack of time. I'm past the years of my life where I can really dig into something like running a Linux system. I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea; Linux people always think the way I want to think.

I've never really been associated with the hackers very much. I am sympathetic to them. I understand how their mind works. It's like a child that is born and wants to explore every little - open up every little drawer there is and find out how the world works.

It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips?I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain. Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

I think Apple's revenge is just the fact that Windows, you know, PCs all became Macintoshes in a way.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach.

College just didn't even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.

The easier it is to do something, the harder it is to change the way you do it.

I had designed -in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I'd do it in life as job.

I want to feel that I own things,

We truly could have used the later Jobs in earlier years at Apple, is what I feel.

With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away

Geek it's really more a characteristic where you don't socialize. You don't talk the normal languages.

Well, I have many models of Prius that got recalled, but I have a new model that didn't get recalled. This new model has an accelerator that goes wild, but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again--safely.

When you're about 20 years old, you kind of think out - I figured out that it was better - less good to be successful and better to have a laughing life, laugh more than you frown all through your life. Because on the day you die, which one would you have said had the happier life, the better life? And so I put a lot of humor in my life.

Artists work best alone. Work alone.

But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.

The Homebrew Computer Club was the highlight of my life. I was too shy to ever talk in the club meeting, but the way that I could communicate sometimes was by doing good designs. I was very skilled at a certain type of circuit design.

In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.

I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things.

I had no money. I had no savings account.So I would bring down my color TV set, a Sears TV with a cable snaked into it - they had no video-in back in those days - and hooked it up to the circuit of very few chips and then a little keyboard you could type on. And I was trying to impress people with how did he do it with fewer chips than anyone could ever imagine?

I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.

If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you'll develop skills that other professionals don't have.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.