Steve Wozniak > Quotes

“If you love what you do and are willing to do what it 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.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window”
― Steve Wozniak

“Artists work best alone. Work alone.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“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…”
― Steve Wozniak

“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.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.”
― Steve Wozniak

“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.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. 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.

[CNN interview (December 8, 2010)]”
― Steve Wozniak

“I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.”
― Steve Wozniak

“when you don't have the hardware resources, you have to take advantage of what you have inside the chip”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned to not 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.”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience.”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone…I didn’t ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Try to think of new ways to solve the old problems. Very often we look at something we have and say, "I could make it better.' That's innovation.”
― Steve Wozniak

“A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book ... I learned to not 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.”
― Steve Wozniak

“social games. The Vietnam War only solidified that attitude. That’s why I was sure, even at twenty-two, that I didn’t want to switch from engineering to management, ever. I didn’t want to go into management and have to fight political battles and take sides and step on people’s toes and all that stuff.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you're perceived as intelligent. I'm a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you're told it is.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“a lot of people confuse that story with Apple’s, saying that we started Apple in a garage. Not true. HP started in a garage, true. But in the case of Apple, I worked in my room at my apartment and Steve worked in his bedroom in his parents’ house. We only did the very last part of assembly in his garage”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“In my head, the guy who’d rather laugh than control things is going to be the one who has the happier life.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Sometimes you can’t prove whether you’re right or wrong. Only time can tell that. But if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that’s a key to happiness. And a key to confidence. Another key I found to happiness was to realize that I didn’t have to disagree with someone and let it get all intense. If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don’t have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone. So don’t sweat it! You have to trust your own designs, your own intuition, and your own understanding of what your invention needs to be.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore’s PET. These would become our direct competitors. But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one. I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high-resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was—and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer. At first that mode didn’t mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic. The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.”
― Steve Wozniak

“I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell. Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measly printer interface engineer. Something tiny. I told him, “My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators.” After a few days, I was turned down again. I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Now, I accept that Apple had to work the way a company has to. There are a lot of people who operate the company, and there are a lot of people on the board who run things. So the reasoning is very difficult to see. I mean, this was a time when the company had one reputation but it was totally different on the inside. It very much bothered me that you can get away with all kinds of things when you are successful. For example, a bad person can get away with a lot of things if they have a lot of money. And a bad person can hide it—hide behind the money—and keep on being a bad person.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“little,”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“hope you’ll be 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 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.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“But we knew what were getting into because Mike Markulla told us. He said, “This is going to be a marketing company.” The product is going to be driven, in other words, by demands that the marketing department finds in customers.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon