Quotes from Nathan Myhrvold

Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options.

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing!

Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether.

Age can be wonderful for red wine, but not for spacecraft.

People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.

Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.'

The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain 'We're gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.'

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.

Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present.

Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.

Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn't seen before. So, I had this idea of... let's cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.

Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown.

The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.

I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.

Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.

It's always easier to be a critic than a creator.