Larry Ellison: 5 Quotes About Apple, Steve Jobs, Google And The NSA [VIDEO]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had much to say in his recent interview with Charlie Rose on CBS. He talked about his friend, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, describing the days and weeks of Jobs’ declining health before his eventual passing on Oct. 5, 2011. Ellison, an Apple director until 2002, said that the company faces a decline without Jobs. He also discussed his relationship (or lack thereof) with Google CEO Larry Page, and even managed to spark controversy by taking a contrarian approach to the National Security Agency’s recently exposed surveillance programs. We’ve embedded the full video interview with Ellison below.

We’ve collected the five best quotes from Ellison’s interview, thanks to transcripts provided by CBS.

1. Larry Ellison on Steve Jobs before his death:

I'd go over there all the time. And the walks -- we'd always go for walks. We'd always go for walks. And the walks just kept getting shorter. Until near the end, we'd kind of walk around the block or maybe -- maybe four blocks, something like that. And you just watched him getting weaker. And this is the strongest guy I knew. This was absolutely the strongest, most willful person I have ever met. And after seven years, the cancer even wore him out. And that's was what it was. He was just tired of fighting. Tired of the pain. And he decided, shocked Lorraine, shocked everybody that the medication was gonna stop. He just pulled off the meds -- I think on a Saturday or a Sunday. And by the following Wednesday he -- he was gone.

2. Larry Ellison on Apple without Steve Jobs:

He was -- he was brilliant. I mean, our Edison. He was our Picasso. He was an incredible inventor… We saw -- we conducted the experiment. I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs (raises hand). We saw Apple without Steve Jobs (lowers hand). We saw Apple with Steve Jobs (raises hand). Now, we're gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs (lowers hand).

3. Larry Ellison on Google CEO Larry Page:

I think most of-- the only problem-- guys I have trouble with are the Google guys. Larry specifically. He makes the decisions over there. He runs that company. No one else runs that company. And they decided -- let me very clear. They -- when you program -- when you write a program for the Android phone, you write it. You -- you use the Oracle tool -- Oracle Java tools for everything. And at the very end, you press a button and said, "Convert this to Android format." We don't compete with Google. We don't do anything Google does. We -- we just think they took our stuff and -- and that was -- and that was wrong. That's a completely separate issue. I think what they did was -- was -- absolutely evil … This really bothers me. I don't -- I don't see how he thinks you can just copy someone else's stuff. It really-- it really bothers me.

4. Larry Ellison on why NSA surveillance is essential:

We've been collecting this information for so long -- long before NSA was collecting it. Let me tell you who was collecting it: American Express, Visa, all of your -- all of your credit card data, all of your financial records. This whole issue of privacy is utterly fascinating to me. Who's ever heard of this information being misused by the government. In what way? … By the way, President Obama thinks it's essential. It's essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential.

5. Larry Ellison on when NSA surveillance crosses the line:

If the government used it to do political targeting. If the Democrats used it to go after Republicans. If the Republicans used it to go after Democrats. In other words, if it became -- if we stop looking for terrorists and we started looking for people with -- on the other side of the aisle.

What do you think about Larry Ellison’s statements? Will any of these Ellison quotes stick with you? Check out the video interview and give us your thoughts in the comments section below.