"Profitability, growth, and safeguards against existential risks are crucial to strengthening a company's long-term prospects. But if these three factors constitute a company's 'hard power,' firms also need 'soft power': public trust and acceptance, won by fulfilling a company's social responsibility."

"Becoming an entrepreneur is like walking through flames. You either ignore it, deal with it or be engulfed by it. You must realize when you make it, the burns will heal and you’ll become a better person because of it."

"It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky."

"With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. Produces at least a quarter of the world's genomic data - more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution."

"Only a madman would try to market headache medicine today under the name John's Headache Pills. This would be insufficiently techno-marvelous. No, the name must sound like it carne out of a laboratory yesterday ... Zantistat 100, or something like that."

"If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble."