Elizabeth Holmes

“What I really want out of life is to discover something new: something mankind didn't know was possible to do.”

“I work all the time, and I'm basically in the office from the time I wake up and then working until I go to sleep every day.”

“The right to protect the health and well-being of every person, of those we love, is a basic human right.”

“Anywhere from 40% to 60% of people, when they're given a requisition by a doctor to go get tested, don't, because they're scared of needles or the locations are inconvenient or the cost is too high. And if you're not even getting tested, how is it possible that we're going to move toward an era of preventive medicine?”

“What matters is how well we do in trying to make people's lives better. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I work the way that I work. And that's why I love what I'm doing so much.”

“I think a lot of young people have incredible ideas and incredible insights, but sometimes they wait before they go give their life to something. What I did was just to start a little earlier.”

“Patients are empowered by having better access to their own health information, and then by owning their own data.”

“Every time you create something new, there should be questions. And to me, that's a sign that you've actually done something that is transformative.”

“At a relatively early age, I began to believe that building a business was perhaps the greatest opportunity for making an impact, because it's a tool for making a change in the world.”

“With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early, they can take steps to avert getting sick.”

“Today, blood work and science are able to provide more of a movie of your health, identifying trends before they become an issue.”

“The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood.”

“No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can't do that if you don't really understand why you're getting certain tests done and when you don't know what the results mean when you get them back.”

“I really believe that if we were from another planet, and we sat down to put our heads together on torture experiments, the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking their blood out would probably qualify as a pretty good one.”

“We know more about our credit cards than we know about our bodies.”

“When I thought about having the greatest impact with my life, I thought about all the times people lose loved ones because diseases weren't detected early enough. I thought, 'I can play a role there.'”

“I love adventures.”

“It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn't tell you what's going on at a biochemical level.”

“Too often you see someone fall, break a rib, go in to the doctor and discover a tumor.”

“The worst possible thing in the world is to have someone who doesn't believe in you.”