The landscape is littered with the corpses of people who have made predictions, so I won't try to predict what America will look like a hundred years from now. Nobody remembers what you said anyway, unless you're Nostradamus.
My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever. That has always stuck with me.
People think of liberty or freedom as being happiness, but it's not. Those very smart people who wrote "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" had it right.
Morale comes not from things that you layer on to make people happy. It comes from being able to build. People like to build. The question is, Could it be done? The answer is, Absolutely.
Go to bed early and wake up early. The morning hours are good.
Love and sex? People will die for love.
It's impossible to interact with an eighteen-month-old child and not come away with the impression that people are fundamentally good.
When you're a little kid, you have no idea how much your parents love you.
A Third World jail would not have a chance against my wife.
I'm certainly the kind of person that has to grow on a woman. It takes repeated exposure to wear down her defenses.
I wear the same thing every weekday, and I have for ten years. I don't like to think about what I want to wear in the morning. You should definitely stay away from asking me fashion questions.
What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.
It seems fundamentally unfair to me that there is this physical speed limit in the universe -- the speed of light -- and you can't go faster than that. To have this huge universe out there and to not be able to get on a faster-than-light-speed ship and go explore the galaxy.... I really think very, very deep in the human psyche there is this need to explore. The pre-Einstein people didn't know that there were any limits to speed. And one of the things that comes out of Einstein's theory is that the speed of light is an absolute limit, that you can't go faster than that. And that seems unfair to me.
Everyone always says that parenting is not a popularity contest. I think that grandparenting is.
Debt is a useful invention. It's why people can afford houses before they reach seventy. They can actually have the house while they need it and then work and pay for it. That's very, very useful.
What I would really like people to say about Amazon is that we raised the bar on customer experience for every industry all over the world. Some companies have missions that are even bigger than the company; an example of that would be Sony. Sony, coming out of World War II, said that their mission was, "We are going to make Japan known for quality." They had a mission that was bigger than Sony. It was a mission for Japan. And we have a similar mission.
Sometimes I think the Time Person of the Year is chosen for the man, and I think sometimes they are chosen as a symbol of something, and my selection was clearly that. They weren't choosing Jeff Bezos so much as they were choosing me as a symbol for the Internet. Yeah, my parents were very proud. I mean, they are parents. They are not objective.
When you're young, deferring gratification is not a honed skill. As you get older, you get better at the marathon mentality.
People need to think of themselves as fortunate.
At the end of the day, when you're eighty years old and looking back on your life, you want to have minimized the number of regrets you have. That's what should drive people. Not how much money they have. It's regrets that I think haunt people at the end of their life.
Published in the January 2002 issue
