Top 150 Eric Schmidt Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Find a way to say yes to things. Say yes to invitations to a new country, say yes to meet new friends, say yes to learn something new. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference. Yes lets you stand out in a crowd, be the optimist, see the glass full, be the one everyone comes to. Yes is what keeps us all young.”

— Eric Schmidt

52. “There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don’t have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them.”

— Eric Schmidt

53. “Do not be afraid to fail, but also, do not be afraid to succeed.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

55. “Ultimately, in the Internet, openness has always won. I cannot imagine that the current competitive environment would reverse that.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

57. “People are building communities of people who use video. They’re sharing them. YouTube’s traffic continues to grow very quickly.”

— Eric Schmidt

58. “We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company.”

— Eric Schmidt

59. “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

60. “A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don’t do it.”

— Eric Schmidt

61. “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

62. “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.”

— Eric Schmidt

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Make sure you would work for yourself.”

— Eric Schmidt

68. “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

69. “Half of Google’s revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.”

— Eric Schmidt

70. “If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.”

— Eric Schmidt

71. “Not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it?”

— Eric Schmidt

72. “Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”

— Eric Schmidt

73. “When a CEO looks around her staff meeting, a good rule of thumb is that at least 50 percent of the people at the table should be experts in the company’s products and services and responsible for product development. This will help ensure that the leadership team maintains focus on product excellence. Operational components like finance, sales, and legal are obviously critical to a company’s success, but they should not dominate the conversation.”

— Eric Schmidt

74. “The trend has been mobile was winning. It’s now won.”

— Eric Schmidt

75. “There are people who are team players and really care about the company. When they speak up, it matters a lot to me because I know they are coming from the right place.”

— Eric Schmidt

76. “Coach Wooden once said, “Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.”

— Eric Schmidt

77. “To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes:.”

— Eric Schmidt

78. “Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”

— Eric Schmidt

79. “This is why most conference rooms at Google have two projectors. One of them is for videoconferencing with other offices or for projecting meeting notes. The other is for data. When discussing options and opinions, we start the meetings with data. We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.”

— Eric Schmidt

80. “The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they’ve actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They’re not sending bombs at each other.”

— Eric Schmidt

81. “Praise is underused and underappreciated as a management tool.”

— Eric Schmidt

82. “Greatest thing in life is to keep the young mind young.”

— Eric Schmidt

83. “Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.”

— Eric Schmidt

84. “A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we’d say, ‘Boy, that’s interesting. Let’s add some more engineers.’”

— Eric Schmidt

85. “One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It’s simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who’s online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.”

— Eric Schmidt

86. “The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It’s better for the world; it’s better for our advertisers; it’s better for Google.”

— Eric Schmidt

87. “It’s very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it’s so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.”

— Eric Schmidt

88. “Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it’s always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn’t mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.”

— Eric Schmidt

89. “I’ve come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.”

— Eric Schmidt

90. “In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about.”

— Eric Schmidt

91. “For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.”

— Eric Schmidt

92. “I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.”

— Eric Schmidt

93. “Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women.”

— Eric Schmidt

94. “Knaves are not to be confused with divas. Knavish behavior is a product of low integrity; diva-ish behavior is one of high exceptionalism. Knaves prioritize the individual over the team; divas think they are better than the team, but want success equally for both. Knaves need to be dealt with as quickly as possible.”

— Eric Schmidt

95. “Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future, and it will exist primarily online.”

— Eric Schmidt

96. “Work-life balance. This is another touchstone of supposedly “enlightened” management practices that can be insulting to smart, dedicated employees.”

— Eric Schmidt

97. “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws.”

— Eric Schmidt

98. “The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”

— Eric Schmidt

99. “Work-life balance. This is another touchstone of supposedly “enlightened” management practices that can be insulting to smart, dedicated employees. The phrase itself is part of the problem: For many people, work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.”

— Eric Schmidt

100. “Most companies’ culture just happens; no one plans it. That can work, but it means leaving a critical component of your success to chance. Elsewhere in this book we preach the value of experimentation and the virtues of failure, but culture is perhaps the one important aspect of a company where failed experiments hurt.”

— Eric Schmidt