American Quotes

Our moral, religious, and political traditions are united in their respect for the dignity of human life.

One measure of your success will be the degree to which you build up others who work with you. While building up others, you will build up yourself.

The basic principle which I believe has contributed more than any other to the building of our business as it is today, is the ownership of our company by the people employed in it.

My friends and family, especially my mom and dad, are always saying I should smile more.

Nowadays people seem to switch schools, either because they have to, and certain schools only serve certain grades, or because they move to a different place or have some particular interest, but I was in the same school for 13 years.

Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home.

My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.

My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things.

Most of the people who had PCs did not have modems and could not use those PCs as communicating devices. They really were using them for spreadsheets or word processing or storing recipes or playing games or what have you.

If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.

I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I think the support of the other team at AOL and everybody's really shared passion and belief about this and - saying that some day everybody was going to be on line.

I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.

I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.

I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start.

I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world.

I do think actually in this case the government does get credit for funding some of the basic research.

I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness.

From a relatively early age I got interested in business.

Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.

But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen.

Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.

And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.

I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's.

For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There's many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.

You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.

It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.

There's just kind of a sweetness about Canadians. Americans are a little more pushy, I mean, in a way that I enjoy - they're basically pushy because of their enthusiasm - we're a lot clumsier than other people.