Sal Khan

“Great people are attracted to great people and great visions.”

“We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.”

“No one goes on a direct path, even though it sometimes feels like your peers might be racing ahead. Everyone's trying to figure it out. But if you just put yourself out there, step out of your comfort zone, establish yourself in terms of skills, mentorship, but leave space for your passions, then you're going to turn out pretty well.”

“I am personally an idealist. I was lucky enough to follow my dreams in my own life, so you should definitely follow your dreams.”

“Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning so that they realize they're already smart.”

“At the end of the day, what matters is whether your product works and whether people like it.”

“I learned from my peers, and I learned from doing projects, and I learned from mentors, but I learned very little from lectures, and I've talked about how little I attended them.”

“I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess; they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had.”

“Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.”

“I always wanted to start a school. I talked about it in college - but I didn't do anything about it.”

“The reason the gifted students of the world like Khan Academy is because we don't say, 'Memorize this formula,' but say, 'Let's try to derive it from core principles,' or, 'I forgot my trig identity, so I'm going to just try to prove this to you.'”

“I never viewed technology as a replacement for the human experience. I viewed it as something that could liberate the human experience.”

“What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.”

“My father's side of the family was very active in education.”

“I'm the 'Dear Abby' of math problems. But if you understand something, shouldn't you be able to explain it? Isn't that the whole point?”

“People who are looked up to in America will often say, 'I don't get math.' And they'll often say it like they're being humble, but they seem almost proud of it because it's acceptable to act this way.”

“I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.”

“A lot of times, when kids have problems with algebra or trigonometry, it has nothing to do with the subject matter, has nothing to do with their innate intelligence. It's just they that they had some gaps in elementary school that they never got to fill in.”

“India, with one of the largest education systems in the world, has always been a priority for Khan Academy.”

“When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit, I would be on the cover of 'Forbes.'”