"Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."
"A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last."
"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."
"What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming."
"There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."
"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."
"If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."
"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."
"Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online."
"We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business."
"What's dangerous is not to evolve."
"There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward."
"The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home."
"Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities."
"But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908."
"Strip malls are history."
"What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives."
"The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil."
"I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize."
"You want your customers to value your service."
"The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'"
"I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers."
"My own view is that every company requires a long-term view."
"Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable."
"Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way."
