Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it’s on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.

Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

The way out of the depression is to start spending and doing things.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

We were all young and we were all inventing our careers. I was very close to Jackson, just as I’d been very close to Laura Nyro. With each person I had a unique relationship.

I don’t know the exact details of his background but from what I have read Mr. Abramovich had a very humble start in life and has made his own luck.

Nobody’s ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there’s some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

No human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient [for] the duty of superintending the industry of private people … towards the employment most suitable to the interest of the society.

Edison, to a greater extent than has ever been recognized, is the father of American industrial methods.

No one loses anything by raising wages as soon as he is able. It has always paid us. Low wages are the most costly any employer can pay. It is like using low-grade material–the waste makes it very expensive in the end. There is no economy in cheap labor or cheap material. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to reduce wages. I think we were the last big company to come to it. Now I am mighty glad that wages are climbing again.

As a rule, we find what we look for; we achieve what we get ready for.

Money will ruin the life of any man who treats it like anything but a tool with which to work.