Larry Ellison Quotes
Born: August 17, 1944
Larry Ellison, the visionary co-founder and former CEO of Oracle, is a titan of innovation whose relentless pursuit of competitive advantage reshaped the technology landscape. With a philosophy rooted in disruption and a maverick’s belief that conventional wisdom is a trap, Ellison built a database empire that powers much of the digital world. His quotes resonate because they distill the fierce, uncompromising spirit of Silicon Valley—a blend of audacious risk-taking, sharp strategic insight, and an unapologetic drive to win. From challenging industry giants to championing the cloud, Ellison’s legacy is a testament to the power of seeing the future before others do, inspiring entrepreneurs to break rules and redefine what’s possible.
Larry Ellison Quotes (38)
"I have had all of the disadvantages required for success."
— Larry Ellison"I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum."
— Larry Ellison"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts."
— Larry Ellison"A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others."
— Larry Ellison"Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build."
— Larry Ellison"The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application."
— Larry Ellison"We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don't decide for you."
— Larry Ellison"Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software."
— Larry Ellison"To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'"
— Larry Ellison"People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don't like change. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding... We're modernizing the sport."
— Larry Ellison"What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people."
— Larry Ellison"We've announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand - connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet."
— Larry Ellison"Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible."
— Larry Ellison"Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses."
— Larry Ellison"They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want."
— Larry Ellison"Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high."
— Larry Ellison"One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water."
— Larry Ellison"What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language."
— Larry Ellison"We saw - we conducted the experiment. I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we're gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs."
— Larry Ellison"It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead."
— Larry Ellison"I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames."
— Larry Ellison"Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications."
— Larry Ellison"We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java."
— Larry Ellison"Game-playing is more fun when it's virtual because you're more successful. ... in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron."
— Larry Ellison"I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were."
— Larry Ellison"Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States."
— Larry Ellison"We have most of the software industry running Autonomy."
— Larry Ellison"We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water."
— Larry Ellison"When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, 'Convert this to Android format.'"
— Larry Ellison"Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020."
— Larry Ellison