Quotes from Jeff Bezos

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three.

A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

In this industry, there's a lot of cases of being a competitor in one way, but you're often a customer and a vendor in another way. It's not atypical in aerospace. Actually, it's not that atypical in a lot of industries.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I'm building infrastructure the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

You want your customers to value your service.

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It's an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn't sustainable.

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

Strip malls are history.

I'm a genetic optimist.

I don't know all the future steps, but I know one of them: we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path we take, it has to include that gate, and so that's why that's Blue Origin's mission.

If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It's hard to get off of that equilibrium.

One of the things that I'm very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we're at today with space launch is that we don't get to practice enough.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.