Quotes from Sebastian Thrun

People complain about the rich-and-poor divide. It's crazy, no doubt about it. But what gets me is that today, a billionaire or head of state on their smartphone has the same direct access to information as a homeless person has on a smartphone - or a person in Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea.

Elite colleges like Stanford are extremely inaccessible. They're failing in their mission to provide access.

In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.

I used to tell my graduate students at Stanford, 'Don't worry about what job you have to pick because your job picks you. Let your job pick you. Find something you are passionate about. Then when you are passionate, be persistent. Just keep doing it for a while because progress is always hard work. It never rests in ideas.'

Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.

I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.

It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

There will be no more one-size-fits-all. Education will respond to you.

If we study learning as a data science, we can reverse engineer the human brain and tailor learning techniques to maximize the chances of student success. This is the biggest revolution that could happen in education, turning it into a data-driven science, and not such a medieval set of rumors professors tend to carry on.

Many of us are inspired and are eager to get things done. But once too many people are involved, life becomes complicated. We are all social beings, so we have an innate urge to incorporate everyone's thoughts.

I'd really love to see a business model for higher education going forward that is actually affordable, that uses modern technology to reach scale and quality and that really reimburses the services rendered in a way that's meaningful to everybody.

In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.

At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment.

There is enormous value in face to face interaction.

At Udacity, we always strive to make things better and learn from our mistakes.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

I always felt that if countries knew each other better, there would be less war. Often, conflict goes with demonizing other countries and cultures.

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

I'd aspired to give people a profound education - to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea.

In much of computer science, I can easily 'auto-grade' your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can't do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.

Self-driving cars will enable car-sharing even in spread-out suburbs. A car will come to you just when you need it. And when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won't even have to look for parking.

Less than one percent of U.S. college students attend Ivy League schools, and these students don't necessarily reflect the world's brightest and most capable thought leaders but, rather, the people who've been afforded the most opportunities to succeed.

When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.