Steve Jobs Quotes
617 Steve Jobs Quotes
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[Larry Land] He was my model of what an HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics guy. He would bring me stuff to play with. He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker, and he put it on this driveway. So I raced home, and I told my dad he was wrong. ‘No, it needs an amplifier, it can work without an amplifier. There’s some trick’ [said his father] I keep saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he actually walked down with me and saw it. And he said, ‘Well I’ll be a bat out of hell’.
Steve Jobs
[On his father] He was not an educated man, but I had always thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much, but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he could figure it out.
Steve Jobs
It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realised that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment.
Steve Jobs
Both my parts got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.
Steve Jobs
[At school] I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.
Steve Jobs
[At school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
Steve Jobs
I had a good friend named Rick Ferrentino and we’d get into all sorts of trouble. Like we made little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the teachers were beside themselves.
Steve Jobs
[Getting kids to tell them the lock combinations and then changing the lock combinations] Then we went outside and switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that night to straighten things out.
One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch.
Steve Jobs
My father’s father was an alcoholic and whipped him with a belt, but I’m not sure if I ever got spanked. Both of my parents knew the school was at fault for tying to make me memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating me.
Steve Jobs
Teddy [Imogene Hill] became one of the saints in my life. After school one day, se gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought, ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars.’ And I handed it back within two days. I just wanted to learn and to please her.
Steve Jobs
I learned more from her [Imogene Hill] than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for her I’m sure I would have gone to jail. In my class, it was just me she cared about. She saw something in me.
Steve Jobs
[Aptitude test at end of fourth grade] I scored at the high school sophomore level.
Steve Jobs
[To his parents on being bullied in seventh grade] I insisted they put me in a different school. When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I had to go back to Crittenden. So they researched where the best schools were and scraped together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in a nicer district.
Steve Jobs
When I moved here, these corners were still orchards. The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That’s when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.
Steve Jobs
[To Sunday school pastor] If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it? The pastor answered ‘Yes, God knows everything.’ [Jobs then pulled out the Life magazine on starving children in Biafra] Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children? ‘Steve I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.’
Steve Jobs
The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it. I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.
Steve Jobs
[On a newborn calf beginning to walk] It was not something she had learned, but it was instead hardwired into her. A human baby couldn’t do that. I found it remarkable, even though no one else did. It was if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.
Steve Jobs
[Homestead High] It was designed by a famous prison architect. They wanted to make it indestructible.
Steve Jobs
My friends were the really smart kids. I was interested in math and science and electronics. They were too, and also into LSD and the whole counterculture trip.
Steve Jobs
Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated. It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well,’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.
Steve Jobs
They would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on. My dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer of light emitting diodes. So we talked about what to do with them.
Steve Jobs
I saw my first desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also really the first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a thing, I fell in love with it.
Steve Jobs
Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters. My dad would drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.
Steve Jobs
I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked him what he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To Fu*k, to fu*k.’
Steve Jobs
They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang out with them.
Steve Jobs
Out in the back, near the bay, they had a fenced-in area with things like Polaris submarine interiors that had been ripped and sold for salvage. All the controls and buttons were right there. The colors were military greens and grays, but they had these switches and bulb covers of amber and red. There were these big old lever switches that, when you flipped them, it was awesome, like you were blowing up Chicago.
Steve Jobs
In retrospect, a Nash Metropolitan might seem like the most wickedly cool car. But at the time it was the most uncool car in the world. Still, it was a car, so that was great.
Steve Jobs
My dad helped me buy and inspect it. The satisfaction of getting paid and saving up for something, that was very exciting.
Steve Jobs
I got stoned for the first time that summer. I was fifteen, and then began using pot regularly.
Steve Jobs
[When his father found some dope in his son’s car] ‘What’s this?’ he asked. That’s marijuana. That was the only real fight I ever got in with my dad. He wanted me to promise that I’d never use pot again, but I wouldn’t promise.
Steve Jobs
I was starting to get stoned a bit more. We would also drop acid occasionally, usually in fields or in cars.
Steve Jobs
I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology – Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear.
Steve Jobs
When I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite.
Steve Jobs
This is where is was and here, next door, is where the auto shop class used to be.
Steve Jobs
[On ordering a part by collect call as a school student] I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.
Steve Jobs
Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics than I did. I liked him right away. I was a little more mature than my years, and he was a little less mature than his, so it evened out. Woz was very bright, but emotionally he was my age.
Steve Jobs
It was an incredible time for music. It was like living at a time when Beethoven and Mozart were alive. Really. People will look back on it that way. And Woz and I were deeply into it.
Steve Jobs
We tracked down this guy in Santa Cruz who put out this newsletter on Dylan. Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some of the people around him were not scrupulous, because soon there were tapes all around. Bootlegs of everything. And this guy had them all.
Steve Jobs
[Bootleg copies of Dylan concerts] I had more than a hundred hours, including every concert on the ’65 and ’66 tour.
Steve Jobs
Instead of big speakers I bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just lie in my bed and listen to that stuff for hours.
Steve Jobs
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