I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat

When I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere.

If you're doing something radically new, you need a team that's willing to go on a ride that's very different from anything they've encountered before.

I begin by looking for megatrends, changes in the world that will create major new demands. My goal is to create a company that can be there to meet those demands.

When people lose faith in the idea, you have to let them go, because they start to undermine it for everyone else.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

My talent is getting things to work that people think are many decades in the future. I say we can make them happen now.

I'd rather have half of my idea change the world than my whole idea be a few papers in a journal.

Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.

I look away, but we've caught each other. And I know this wasn't just a ghost story to him, even if it was to the others.

Yeah! Bring it on lake!" -Coach Gleeson Hedge

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?

I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.

If you don't surrender to God, don't think you don't surrender. Everybody surrenders -- to something.

Children do not see themselves as shocking or surprising and do not want other people to do so.

I just directed another picture called 'American Dream' with Nick Stahl. Just finished shooting principal photography right before I started ['Lincoln'].

Time away from thinking about something is as valuable - perhaps even more so - than directly thinking about it.

I'm more liable to hurt myself than someone else.