Here are some of the oddest, funniest, most troubling, and otherwise most memorable tech quotes of 2014:
12. “Yeah, we call that Boob-er.”
—Travis Kalanick, the C.E.O. of the car-ride service Uber, making a wisecrack about women on demand to a journalist who profiled him for GQ.
11. “Apparently, they believe they’re gods.”
—A Portland commissioner, Steve Novick, to the Portland Oregonian, after Uber launched there even though city law prohibits such services.
10. “The risk is worth it. Mike would have been the first to say that.”
—The founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, on CNN, after his company’s SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight, killing a co-pilot, Michael Alsbury.
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9. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.”
—Elon Musk, speaking at a symposium at M.I.T.
8. “We also have a dog. His name’s Beast. He’s a sheepdog. He’s super cute. I love him.”
—Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, in a Q. & A. at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, that he conducted almost entirely in shaky Mandarin Chinese.
7. “There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy, and how far we want to protect it and from whom.”
—Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at Oklahoma City University’s law school, on Sept. 11.
6. “Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.”
—Aaron Levie, the C.E.O. of Box, on Twitter.
5. “It’s a love story, baby, just say, Yes.”
—Spotify, in a statement on its Web site, after Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalogue of music from the Spotify service. Spotify wanted Swift to reconsider.
4. “It’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for raises have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back. Because somebody’s going to know: ‘That’s the kind of person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to.’ ”
—The C.E.O. of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, to Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College and a board member at Microsoft, onstage at a conference in Phoenix celebrating women in tech. He later apologized, writing in a memo to Microsoft employees, “I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work.”
3. “It’s a horribly mismanaged company—probably a lot of pot smoking going on there.”
—Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and an early investor in Facebook, discussing Twitter on CNBC.
2. “I AM ABLE TO TWEET.”
—The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökcek, a member of Turkey’s ruling AK party, in a Twitter message posted after the country began blocking access to the social-media platform. The ban lasted only a few weeks before a Turkish court struck it down.
1. “We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.”
—Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, acknowledging in a Bloomberg Businessweek column that he is gay.