Top 150 Eric Schmidt Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Don’t tell me, show me.”

— Eric Schmidt

2. “We run the company by questions, not by answers.”

— Eric Schmidt

3. “The self driving car is not self-aware. It’s just driving; it’s not thinking.”

— Eric Schmidt

4. “Say yes to more things.”

— Eric Schmidt

5. “There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”

— Eric Schmidt

6. “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

— Eric Schmidt

7. “The Internet of things will augment your brain.”

— Eric Schmidt

8. “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

— Eric Schmidt

9. “In a networked world, trust is the most important currency.”

— Eric Schmidt

10. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

— Eric Schmidt

11. “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

— Eric Schmidt

12. “Every 2 days we create as much information as we did up to 2003.”

— Eric Schmidt

13. “Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something which is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value.”

— Eric Schmidt

14. “The Internet is fast becoming a cesspool where false information thrives.”

— Eric Schmidt

15. “The coach doesn’t have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.”

— Eric Schmidt

16. “The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.”

— Eric Schmidt

17. “For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an “obligation to dissent”.”

— Eric Schmidt

18. “Just remember when you post something, the computers remember forever.”

— Eric Schmidt

19. “If you believe that the qualities defining you are carved in stone, you will be stuck trying to prove them over and over again, regardless of the circumstances. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort.”

— Eric Schmidt

20. “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about;.”

— Eric Schmidt

21. “The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don’t just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn’t know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, ‘I must have it.’”

— Eric Schmidt

22. “If I give you a penny, then you’re a penny richer and I’m a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I’ll have it too.”

— Eric Schmidt

23. “I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.”

— Eric Schmidt

24. “Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.”

— Eric Schmidt

25. “In general in technology, if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.”

— Eric Schmidt

26. “Technology will move faster than governments, so don’t legislate before you understand the consequences.”

— Eric Schmidt

27. “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are;.”

— Eric Schmidt

28. “Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that’s a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.”

— Eric Schmidt

29. “It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”

— Eric Schmidt

30. “If you thought when you got your job at 20 that it would never change you were misinformed. Retrain yourself to be curious.”

— Eric Schmidt

31. “The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.”

— Eric Schmidt

32. “Mobile is the future and there’s no such thing as communication overload.”

— Eric Schmidt

33. “Google dress code was: “You must wear something”.”

— Eric Schmidt

34. “Debbie Biondolillo, Apple’s former head of human resources, who said, “Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.”

— Eric Schmidt

35. “You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.”

— Eric Schmidt

36. “Google Maps are phenomenal. Yep, ask an Apple user.”

— Eric Schmidt

37. “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

— Eric Schmidt

38. “We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world’s information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It’s a tremendous equalizer. Information is power.”

— Eric Schmidt

39. “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

— Eric Schmidt

40. “Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions.”

— Eric Schmidt

41. “One person’s definition of evil is another person’s different definition.”

— Eric Schmidt

42. “Digital empowerment will be, for some, the first experience of empowerment in their lives, enabling them to be heard, counted and taken seriously – all because of an inexpensive device they can carry in their pocket.”

— Eric Schmidt

43. “People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.”

— Eric Schmidt

44. “It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional resources.”

— Eric Schmidt

45. “Google is more than a business. Google is a belief system. And we believe passionately in the open Internet model.”

— Eric Schmidt

46. “If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.”

— Eric Schmidt

47. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”

— Eric Schmidt

48. “The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.”

— Eric Schmidt

49. “John Dewey, an American philosopher and writer, said that “a problem well put is half solved.”

— Eric Schmidt

50. “I think it’s pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, ‘Who am I?’ Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.”

— Eric Schmidt