Top 90 Paul Allen Quotes

You’ve got to enjoy time with your family and friends, and if you‘re involved in sports franchises, those peak moments in playoff games. You have to enjoy life.

My high school in Seattle, Lakeside, seemed conservative on the surface, but it was educationally progressive.

Back to Microsoft days, I’m always looking for, ‘OK, that’s great, but what can go wrong?’

Something that is characteristic of me is the breadth of my interests.

I’m always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it’s much more complex than you thought.

You want someone who will challenge you back; sometimes, that’s the way the best decisions get made.

I grew up watching games with my father at Washington Husky Stadium. When I moved out to Seattle, I had a friend who would take me to Seahawks games in the 1980s.

Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place: from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead.

Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art – from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.

Vulcan Inc. is a unique organization that unites commercial, philanthropic, research, policy, and technology innovation. Our goals are ambitious – from saving Africa‘s elephants to unlocking the secrets of the human brain to building sustainable communities and opening up access to space.

It’s really amazing to stand in front of a work you haven‘t seen before and be almost overwhelmed by its beauty and the vision and execution of the artist.

I believe in the power of shared data and technology to help build a better future.

Whenever you make the Super Bowl, so many things – you have to have the good general manager and the coach and the great players, and you have to have not too many injuries – everything, game plans and everything, has to fall very much your way for that to happen.

As a species, we’ve always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.

It’s very challenging to carve back market share.

I’m not a video-game player at all.

The thing is, once you’re in the Super Bowl, you want to win. As time goes on, you want to win more and more.

What should exist? To me, that’s the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don’t have? How can we realize our potential?

Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.

What people don’t realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do – by millions of years of evolution – what we do.

I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.

I’m trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.

I’ve been on record many times in the past about the challenge of being competitive with NBA teams in smaller markets.

I think, as an owner, you really want to do the team right, the fans right, and the community right and build a winning organization.

Of course I love basketball.

Sports is such a cyclical thing; it’s often feast or famine. But what you try and do as an owner is build a winning organization.

In an ideal world, everybody would find it easy to talk to the press… but not everybody is so excited.

That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.

Moore‘s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

The possible is constantly being redefined, and I care deeply about helping humanity move forward.

In my own work, I’ve tried to anticipate what’s coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people’s lives in a meaningful way.

The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.

If you have the chance to realize some of these dreams you had as a kid, and you have the opportunity, why not pursue that?

Your dream, when you buy a sports franchise, is to win the championship, the Super Bowl.

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.

Once you own a team for as many years as I have, and you root for that team for that period of time, you’ve got rooting for the Blazers in your blood, and the Sonics are one of our arch-competitors.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There’s so much yet to be discovered.

In order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand – that is probably the critical word.

It’s always interesting to bring scientists together, because they typically have very polarized views.

There was a time when the government cut off funding to SETI, basically, and I thought it was something that should continue, and it was a very interesting scientific question.

I’ve lived in Boston.

I really do care about the health of the players. That’s one of the tough things about the NFL – it’s so physically tough on the players.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It’s not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

If Microsoft had never existed… The industry would probably be very fragmented.

I’m on Twitter, and I have over 10,000 followers. Which is pretty modest compared to Charlie Sheen.

In Portland, I am more involved in the details of trade discussions because I’ve been around that sport longer and can watch tape and can give some input to the drafting process. In football, not at all. It’s so specialized.

I choose optimism. I hope to be a catalyst not only by providing financial resources but also by fostering a sense of possibility: encouraging top experts to collaborate across disciplines, challenge conventional thinking, and figure out ways to overcome some of the world’s hardest problems.

In Seattle, I’ve talked about how Pete Carroll is such… I’m kind of surprised at the variety of styles that successful coaches can have. Some are very communicative and positive and energized – like, Pete Carroll has all that in spades. Some of them are more cerebral; some are more directive.

Artificial intelligence… I’ve been following that since I was in high school.

Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible.

AI2 was born from a desire to create a system that could truly reason about knowledge, rather than just offer up what had been written on a subject before.

There are people out there who don’t see value in intellectual property, and so they’re always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.

As an ex-programmer, I’m still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

It turns out, if you go 1,000 feet down in the ocean, it’s really dark, and the animals are really strange, but if you put on some Pink Floyd, it’s fantastic.

Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say – and I agree – that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound.

Blame me for having to type the backslash in DOS.

Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn’t one of them.

In the early days at Asymetrix, we were focusing on business automation.

As a programmer, you’re working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

The NBA is intense, but the NFL is a whole ‘nother level of intensity and dramatic, game-changing plays.

I think if you look at, for instance, what the Seahawks – what we did winning the Super Bowl, that was with a very young team. So you have to blend the experience with young players and develop those as well.

Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.

I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like ‘Jane‘s Fighting Aircraft of World War II‘ when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.

In the computer industry, you’ve got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.

When I was 7 or 8, I became fascinated with hot rods.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore’s law.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won‘t be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don’t operate in isolation.

I was a programmer.

If you think about making a difference in the community, my family has always had a strong interest in the arts. I’m always interested in finding ways to innovate… It’s a blend; it’s not a point focus.

I want to have a family.

The unique thing about Stratolaunch – one of the unique things – is it doesn’t require a fixed launchpad.

I am very excited to be supporting one of the world’s most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere.

Those fortunate to achieve great wealth should put it to work for the good of humanity.

The idea that, you know – when I was growing up – that everybody would carry around a portable communicating device, that was science fiction when I was a kid.

My mother, God bless her, forced me to take touch typing when I was 16.

I’ve always been interested in many different things.

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it’s incredibly, incredibly complex.

Human beings are fragile things, and for the period of time it takes to get them to Mars and back, you have dangerous radiation from the sun and the galaxy. We have to think about issues like that.

That darn luxury tax is pretty painful.

To me, it’s the kind of interesting question the human race should be investing in. Is there intelligent life out there? Are there other beings out there?

I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft – that’s always going to be something I’m known for.

When it comes to helping out, I don’t believe in doing it for the media attention. My goal is to support the organizations that need help.

The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

Computers are really, basically, computing elements and a lot of memory. They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.

As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it’s as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal – what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven’t thought about before. A lot of times, I’m asking myself – ‘This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn’t been done?’

I find the function of the brain incredibly fascinating, and it’s like trying to crack the toughest, most complicated problem there is.