In order to grasp every opportunity, you cannot — you must not — decide your "career path" in advance. Don't have a job fixed in your sights and work backwards — it can be the road to disappointment because you risk passing up opportunities that might take you "off-course."

And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc. And someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it's been a simplistic debate. And that's not what the debate should be about. That's engaging in the wrong debate. The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives? How do we combine all this?

Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut. And be true to the ideas.

Many people talk about a willingness to have failures. I hate failures. I don't think you should strike to make failures. I think it's OK to make mistakes – but by the time they become real failures, you probably should have discovered them much earlier.

You could be brilliant, but if you don’t put in the energy, the output is zero.

I’m so pleased, because Caltech’s name is there as the pioneer of this whole technology…I’m proud of them.

I’m hungry for knowledge…Knowledge, knowledge and I loved it.

One of them—I forgot the others— that I thought was really interesting is, Don’t take yourself too seriously. And I believe in that—I think I believe in that.

At the age of 21, as a Moeid, I believed that behind every universal phenomenon there must be beauty and simplicity in its description. This belief remains true today.

We started at Caltech asking very simple questions: how do we understand the molecule dynamics or the dynamics of molecules, emotions and so on, molecules but in a coherent fashion.