Quotes from Larry Ellison

I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.

I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.

It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.

Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence.

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.

Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.

When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don't know what you are going to do.

Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.

Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.

Both my mother and I were determined that we weren't going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.

I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.

Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.

If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.

When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, 'Convert this to Android format.'

What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.

Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.

I love sailing. I like it more when I am winning.

Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.

They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.

My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it's someone's home that you walk through.