"Only a few generations have been granted the role of determining whether a revolution in communication will allow our better angels – or our darker angels – to win. You leave here with incredible opportunity, but also with immense responsibility."

"Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime."

"The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture used to be limited to a few entrepreneurial clusters. Now the Internet has spread that culture everywhere."

"There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better."

"Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave"

"Progress and stability are mutually exclusive."

"Number one is "Do you have curiosity?" Number two is "Does it translate to imagination?" But number three is "Did it translate to action?" That’s the difference between someone with an idea and someone who is an entrepreneur."

"Customer Development says “Glad you have these hypotheses about your startup. All of them are probably wrong.”"

"Don’t execute other peoples advice if you can’t explain why you’re doing it."

"We used to pivot by firing people. Now we fire the hypotheses."

"A startup is not a smaller version of a large company."

"A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model."

"Will you let darker angels win as you add fire to the flame, or will you seek out and spread real news?"

"Young entrepreneurs tend to be fearless and have no respect for the status quo, and that’s exactly what you need in an environment where the status quo is going to put you out of business."

"Don't believe your own b.s. It's real easy to confuse funding with success."

"To predict the future, 1/3 of your team needs to be crazy."

"When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency."

"Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does."

"Strategy Is not a to-do list."

"There are no facts inside the building, so get the hell outside."

"Mentorship is a two-way street. While I was learning from them [brilliant mentors] - and their years of experience and expertise - what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking."

"Entrepreneurship is an art, not a job."

"Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers."

"Founders are truly artists – they see something no one else does."

"In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced."

"The question is whether you'll tell your children that this decade was the beginning of a new dark age, or whether it was the time of something new and wonderful."

"A founder's skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination."

""Build it and they will come” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer."

"On Day One, a startup is a faith-based enterprise."

"Customers don't ask to see your business plan."

"While there is an occasional bad apple, the public market rewards companies with revenue growth and sustainable profits."

"Confusing testosterone with strategy is a bad idea."

"80% of success in your career will come from just showing up. The world is run by those who show up…not those who wait to be asked."

"Light a path for the better angels. The world is counting on you."

"You don't need to be the smartest person to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but figuring out how to move your agenda forward."

"Innovation comes from those who see things that other don’t."

"You feel like you don’t want to express your own opinion about Trump or anti-Trump because of getting into some very divisive arguments. But on the other hand, it’s all pretty much peaceful. It's not the way it actually was during the Vietnam War and also during the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King where buildings were burnt down and people were shot. I lived through that. So in that sense, it's actually much better than it was. I have faith in the American system that does allow for all these disagreements. Let's just hope for the best."

"When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously. As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident … Hillary Clinton can make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi."

"Not at all. You like it? Do you think Cleveland's cool? I mean, I've never heard anybody say 'I'm going to Cleveland on vacation.' What's so good about Cleveland?"

"I don't know about this place, man. I just stayed in my hotel room, man. Every time I look out my window, it's pretty depressing out here, man. It's bad, it's bad. No. No going out in Cleveland, man. It's all factories."

"Uh? They don't like me over here, either."

"Slavery was a byproduct of the quest for profit—economic actors were the architects of the slave plantation systems that came to dominate American society from the Southern United States to the Caribbean and Brazil. It was merchants and planters, not statesmen and jurists, who determined that slave labor was more profitable than free. ... This history constitutes a welcome corrective to the fashionable view that free markets automatically promote social justice."

"Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies."

"The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became."

"The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was."

"The Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class."

"Slavery, Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens proudly affirmed, was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Accordingly, slavery's disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to save the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society."

"In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life."

"Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity."

"American ideas about freedom certainly resonate abroad. Eastern Europeans embraced them after the collapse of Communist rule. Indeed, the years since 1989 have witnessed an unprecedented internationalization of current American concepts of freedom."