Company Founders

"<!-- Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?"

"Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this cafe. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, "Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward …" and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this cafe, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions — "Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number"—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. … Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh."

"It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing."

"It'll make your jaw drop."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."

"Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities."

"It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy."

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"

"I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I'm only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I've got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that."

"If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years."

"They're babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen."

"Real artists ship."

"It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans."

"We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream."

"I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral."

"Walt considered himself religious yet he never went to church. The heavy dose of religiosity in his childhood discouraged him; he especially disliked sanctimonious preachers. But he admired an respected every religion, and his belief in God never wavered."

"He probably did more to heal, or at least soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world."

"Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise."

"Walt was a strange kind of guy, but he’s still by all odds the most important person that animation has ever known. Anybody who knows anything about animation knows that the things that happened at the Disney Studio were the backbone that upheld everything else. Disney created a climate that enabled all of us to exist"

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethos … where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great."

"Despite the absence of a unifying "story" in Fantasia, there are along the way images and sequences with implications and messages — inspirational and disturbing, subtle and strong, scientific and pagan and Christian — all worth noting."

"Most family historians agree that Elias's authoritarian and sometimes cruel nature — and propensity for whipping and even beating his young sons — played a role in turning Walt and Roy against the church. The brothers' ambivalent relationship with organized religion is well documented, as is their strong, personal faith in God."

"That's really an interesting thought because one of things Walt was always complaining about – and I think that's one of the reasons Walt continually pushed for innovation at his studio – was that he always wanted to make things better, he wanted to make new things possible. I think Walt would have been quite impressed with the new digital technology because he would have a brand new tool that he could use in amazing ways. So while on one hand we've lost something as we move forward, I do recognise that things will always be changing. Animation changed from the 1930s to the 40s, on up through the 50s and 60s; there has always been new technologies being created, enabling us to make a better product."

"He definitely believed in God — very definitely. But I think he'd had it [with organized religion] as a child. He never went to church."

"He was a very religious man, but he didn't believe you had to go to church to be religious. … He respected every religion. There wasn't any that he ever criticized. He wouldn't even tell religious jokes."

"There is a relationship between cartooning and people Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney."

"Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don't take their children there sense obscurely that they have failed in some fundamental way, like Muslims who never made it to Mecca."

"Disney, for all his pining for a perfect world (embodied in his depiction of a turn-of-the-century Main Street), did not entirely ignore the authentic. He did kill Bambi's mom, remember. He did permit, perhaps encourage, the occasional sense of danger."

"(Ha!) You belong to Disney, which means you stay busy Cranking out magic and assembly line whimsy! Artists begging me to stop; I won't let 'em! Labor conditions in my shop? I don't sweat 'em! I'm powerful enough to make a mouse gigantic! With only 3 circles, I dominate the planet! (Ha!) Clearly, there's nobody near me! I'm owning this battle! In fact, I own this whole series! So hop on my Steamboat, boys, but don't rock it! I'll put on a smile on your face and green in your pocket! You'll be safe and insured when you're under my employ! Now, look at it! Gaze upon my empire of joy!"

"Walt wanted to communicate with a global audience. … He wanted to communicate with a multicultural audiance."

"I remember once that Walt said something to the effect that, "I'll make the picture; and when I make the picture then you marketing guys can have it." Nowadays, it's the marketing department telling you what they want."

"When I look at the early days when Walt was really in command of the studio, the pictures did not look like each other at all. They were all different. Bambi doesn't look like Snow White. Snow White doesn't look like Pinnochio. Then Dumbo comes along and that's its own movie and then Fantasia what's that? Each one of these was reaching for something. They all followed the rules of good storytelling."

"So I took my drawings out there and did an interview and I got accepted right away. They said, "Come to work." So I went to work. Walt was still alive then, and he was working on two things; Sleeping Beauty and building Disneyland. Disneyland occupied, probably, about 80% of his time and we got about 20% of it. I remember the meetings and I remember meeting him. I remember what it was like when what we were building was a film that actually had some soul. A piece of artwork That's what we were filming. It wasn't about "make something quick for the marketers.""

"I have seen children brought to me in terrible panics, and interestingly enough most often the Walt Disney movies which do depict very disturbing mother figures. The mothers are always killed or sent to the insane asylums in Walt Disney movies. They are among my experience for Frankenstein, the worst movies in the world for children who have had a problems of the loss of a parent."

"If you can dream it, you can do it."

"You can't just let nature run wild."

"Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever."

"I believe firmly in the efficacy of religion, in its powerful influence on a person's whole life. It helps immeasurably to meet the storms and stress of life and keep you attuned to the Divine inspiration. Without inspiration, we would perish."

"Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting."

"A man should never neglect his family for business."

"Do a good job. You don't have to worry about the money; it will take care of itself. Just do your best work — then try to trump it."

"Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgement, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence."

"All our dreams can come true — if we have the courage to pursue them."

"I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life — drama, pathos and humor."

"To the youngsters of today, I say believe in the future, the world is getting better; there still is plenty of opportunity. Why, would you believe it, when I was a kid I thought it was already too late for me to make good at anything."

"That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be twelve years old. They patronize; they treat children as inferiors. I won't do that. I'll temper a story, yes. But I won't play down, and I won't patronize."

"In my view, wholesome pleasure, sport, and recreation are as vital to this nation as productive work and should have a large share in the national budget."

"Laughter is America's most important export."

"It's a mistake not to give people a chance to learn to depend on themselves while they are young."