185 Quotes by Nathan Myhrvold

A person’s basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.

If you have two steaks, one that’s an inch thick, one that’s 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It’s four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don’t tell you that?

Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: ‘Dad, how could this be true? You’re not even the most feared person in this house.’

If people don’t get paid for their inventions, that’s not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren’t in a position to take them to the next level. If you don’t enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn’t because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore’s Law possible: ‘If we hadn’t brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?’

Nuclear energy is a baseload – meaning it’s power that you can run any time you want, day or night – and carbon-free.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented – putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

When we first did ‘Modernist Cuisine,’ I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, ‘This is insane.’