Steve Jobs' Best Quotes Ever

Steve Jobs is great at playing the countercultural icon. He's a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. There are righteous battles to fight, and with Macs and iTunes and iPhones, Jobs fights them, taking on the entrenched megaliths that try to dictate our tastes in computers and music and mobile phones.

But don't let the black mock turtleneck and denim trousers fool you. More than anything else, Jobs is a canny CEO who knows how to sell product. Steve Wozniak was the technical genius behind the first Apple computer; Jobs saw the marketability. He now presides over a company with $24 billion in annual sales and 22,000 employees. Jobs, 53, is revered by tech and design geeks, but the world's business-school students may have the most to learn from him. Apple's stock has shot up more than 70% over the past year, thanks to Jobs' strategy of focusing on his most profitable customers and coming up with new things to sell them—the ultra-thin MacBook Air most recently—rather than just chasing more market share.

Jobs may be a celebrity CEO, but he doesn't jump out of airplanes or traipse around Africa with bundles of cash. He is always in character and always on message, so much so that when late-night TV parodies him, he's invariably rolling out some new iProduct . Jobs gets called mercurial, egomaniacal, a micromanager. If that sounds a little like a CEO doing his job, maybe that's because he is—and a mighty fine one.

One of the great things about Steve Jobs is what comes out of his mouth.
The CEO of Apple Computer is a master of hype, hyperbole and the catchy phrase. Even when he's trying to talk normally, brilliant verbiage comes tumbling out.
Here's a selection of some of the most insanely great things the man has said, organized by topic: innovation and design, fixing Apple, his greatest sales pitches, life's lessons, taking the fight to the enemy and Pixar.

On Innovation and Design:

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

-- At age 29, in Playboy, February 1985

• "I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do."

-- BusinessWeek Online,Oct. 12, 2004

• "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."

-- Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

• "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

-- BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

• "It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much."

-- BusinessWeek Online, Oct. 12, 2004

• "(Miele) really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years."

-- Wired magazine, February 1996