Top 150 Eric Schmidt Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

54. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

56. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

76. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

84. “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

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

— Eric Schmidt

86. “As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

88. “We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn’t true. If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument.”

— Eric Schmidt

89. “What is your technical insight?”

— Eric Schmidt

90. “General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: “No vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards.”

— Eric Schmidt

91. “There’s been spying for years, there’s been surveillance for years, and so forth, I’m not going to pass judgement on that, it’s the nature of our society.”

— Eric Schmidt

92. “If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

94. “If you have a child, you’ll notice they have two states: asleep or online.”

— Eric Schmidt

95. “Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.”

— Eric Schmidt

96. “Google docs and spreadsheets don’t work if you’re on an airplane. But it’s a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.”

— Eric Schmidt

97. “We’re about to see an acceleration in technological platforms that, for marketers, will be on a scale rivalled only by the arrival of color TV.”

— Eric Schmidt

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

— Eric Schmidt

99. “Perhaps it’s human nature, or just corporate nature, but most people tend to think incrementally rather than transformationally or galactically.”

— Eric Schmidt

100. “With your permission you give us more information about you, your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”

— Eric Schmidt