ERIC SCHMIDT

Fast learners win.

In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time.

Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.

In general in technology, if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it.

Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.

Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.

One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.

We weren't here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win.

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

We know that Google Earth and Google Maps have had a tremendous impact on Google traffic, users, brand, adoption, and advertisers. We also know Google News, for example, which we don't monetize, has had a tremendous impact on searches and on query quality. We know those people search more. Because we've measured it.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

I used to say that you'll have 10 IP address on your body... and it looks like that's going to happen through medical monitoring.

People who bet against the Internet, who think that somehow this change is just a generational shift, miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user. The Internet brings tremendous tools to the end user, and that end user is going to use them.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that's on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don't like.

Your car should drive itself. It's amazing to me that we let humans drive cars... It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.

If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app.

I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

Silicon Valley's involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully - who was the CEO of Apple - had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we're all going, like, 'What's going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?'

There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does.