Larry Brilliant Quotes

In 1980 we declared the globe free of smallpox. It was the largest campaign in United Nations history until the Iraq war. A hundred and fifty thousand people from all over the world, doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better.

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

The great thing about gurus is not that they make you feel everybody's love. It's that they make you feel that you can love everybody.

Google's a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, "If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you." That's what's different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about "don't be evil."

I make a hundred mistakes a day. I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything.

If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting.

If you are constantly making judgments based on superficial affiliations, your world gets to be pretty small.

Life didn't just happen to them. They experienced life at a deeper level than I had ever experienced it. I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the spirit.

The defining character of Steve Jobs isn't his genius, it isn't his talent, it isn't his success. It's his love. That's why crowds came to see him. You could feel that. It sounds ridiculous to talk about love when you are making a gadget. But Steve loved his work, he loved the products he produced, and it was palpable. He communicated that love through bits of steel and plastic.

One percent of the equity, 1 percent of the profits, and 1 percent of the people go into Google.org. The most important asset isn’t money, it’s people. One percent of the people means 60 or 70 of the smartest people in the world trying to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.

If there's a big problem and you've got the right people with you, usually the answer emerges and you do what's the obvious thing to do. I don't think of myself as some great manager or great leader. I've been very lucky to be in the positions that I've been in. I meet a lot of people and I've grown a lot of companies, and I meet a lot of CEOs at big enterprises. I'm always so surprised at how much they seem to know. It doesn't always seem to be correlated to how well they actually do.

This is not something that happens far away to people that we don't know. Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once.