Quotes from Sal Khan

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.

Great people are attracted to great people and great visions.

My parents separated when I was two, and then my father passed away, so I never really knew that side of the family.

Every school is different and serves different populations.

I've already got a beautiful wife, a great son, and a house. What else do you need?

It's definitely important to have a vision, to have kind of a sense of what might be possible, but not to be dogmatic about your beliefs about the way something has to be done.

Being a billionaire is sort of passe.

One's perception of themselves has a much bigger role than has been acknowledged to determine who succeeds and who does not.

Something happens in school sometimes where you're like, 'Oh, I'm not an expert, and I have to defer to people who are.' And it happens not just in school: it happens in religion, too. Defer to the experts. A printing press is a big deal - they got the Bible, and all of a sudden they could read it for themselves.

I've learned that certain things are much harder than when you write about them in a book.

If you're going to charge someone for something, you have to show them value for it.

Our goal is for Khan Academy's software and content to be the best possible learning experience and for it to be for everyone, for free, forever. This is why we are a non-profit, and it's also what drives our small team and supporters.

I'm actually a bit of a technophobe, which surprises people. I like to stay unplugged as much as possible.

I hope I could spend the rest of my life learning and communicating.

Just as computer science is missing from our school system, so is science fiction.

India, with one of the largest education systems in the world, has always been a priority for Khan Academy.

Far too many bright, motivated kids are being badly served by their educational experiences - ones at elite, wealthy schools as well as underfunded ones.

By early 2009, tens of thousands of students were watching tutorials on the Khan Academy every day. The software I wrote for my cousins had become so popular, it was making my $50-a-month web host crash. The possibilities surrounding the academy were so exciting that I had trouble doing my day job properly. And soon, I quit.

There is too much acceptance of people saying, 'I am a math person, or I am an artsy person.' It makes me cringe.

It's an old idea. It's arguably the first way that people learn, that, hey, if you need to learn something, if you're having trouble with it, keep working on it until you master it and then you go to a more advanced concept. But in the education systems that all of us grew up in, we all learned at a fixed pace.

I learned from my peers, and I learned from doing projects, and I learned from mentors, but I learned very little from lectures, and I've talked about how little I attended them.

I always wanted to start a school. I talked about it in college - but I didn't do anything about it.

At a lot of college graduations, you'll hear people say, 'Follow your passions,' and that is important, but no one talks about the stress of not having enough money, the issues of debt, and the issues of work stress.

Free educational materials will, at minimum, prepare more people for college and allow them to be more successful once they get there. Most students want credentials that employers respect, and free educational materials alone will not do this.