Top 150 Eric Schmidt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t tell me, show me.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

3. “Say yes to more things.”

— Eric Schmidt

4. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

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

— Eric Schmidt

11. “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

12. “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

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

— 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. “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

22. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

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

— Eric Schmidt

30. “Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.”

— Eric Schmidt

31. “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

32. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

— Eric Schmidt

33. “There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It’s constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

36. “Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It’s not to have a detailed plan of everything that you’re going to do. You can’t plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it.”

— Eric Schmidt

37. “People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

39. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

41. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

43. “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

44. “Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”188 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”189 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”

— Eric Schmidt

45. “At Google, operations are not just an afterthought: they are critical to the company’s success, and we want to have just as much effort and creativity in this domain as in new product development.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

47. “When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.”

— Eric Schmidt

48. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

50. “If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a ‘searching the world’s videos’ problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I’m trying to say is that search is still the killer app.”

— Eric Schmidt