Bill Gates Quotes

When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works.

The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of people who see that better ways are available; thanks to technology.

You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch.

I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

The vision is that people should have the ultimate in convenience. Being able to get the things they care about on the appropriate device.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn't want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Finally, assuming that many of those are fulfilled, which won't be easy in tight budget times, we're taking the supply side at the basic research level, because that's where government is absolutely fundamental.

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

Vision without execution is daydreaming.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'

Today, the issue isn't quantity of food as much as it is quality-whether kids are getting enough protein and other nutrients to fully develop.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

I don't believe in creating dynastic wealth.
I don't really believe that in a society that aspires to be meritocratic and that believes in equality of opportunity - my kids have had advantage over 99 percent of the kids in the country ...

It's possible - you can never know - that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.

If you count E-mail, I'm on the Internet all day, every day.

Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.

So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side.

You don't have to own a TV network to go out and do a cool show.

If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web.

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Students deserve great teachers. And teachers deserve the support they need to become great.

I'm invested in a lot of battery companies - and there's a lot that exists I'm not in.

Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better.

Kids are taking PCs and the Internet to new heights. They're the ones that are designing the cutting-edge web sites.

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

The first five years have so much to do with how the next 80 turn out.

India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.

Success on the Web require high-level corporate understanding of the Internet's capabilities and support of early test-and-invest projects.

The CEO's role in raising a company's corporate IQ is to establish an atmosphere that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.

We certainly see opportunities in Vietnam for talented people to have jobs in the IT sector, including the improvement of the efficiency of the economy and the government.

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they're rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

Microsoft went into orbit because it had a booster rocket attached to it called IBM.

In the next 15 years, we can halve childhood deaths. That's doable.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

As for drugs - well, Gates was certainly not unusual there. Marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice ...

(In response to Java) Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism-if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities ... You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.

Even when I wrote Basic myself the day before I burned it into a computer I wasn't making design changes. I didn't have a testing team. I did all the testing myself. And there was no project methodology or schedule that, there was the notion of coming to a close means testing a lot at the end and making very few changes.

A company's ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

I have always loved the competitive forces in this business. You know I certainly have meetings where I spur people on by saying, "Hey, we can do better than this. How come we are not out ahead on that?" Thats what keeps my job one of the most interesting in the world.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.

If i will start all over again I would chose network marketing.

People everywhere love Windows.

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies."

Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.

I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.

Well, I went for a ride but I didn't find my car

My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.

I would counsel people to go to college, because it's one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.

Life is not a continuous process, there's some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.

The protestor I think will speak up for the world's poorest.

You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn't make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

The poor can't wait. Philanthropists needed to carry on being generous.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses - it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.

I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.

Change the boundaries of business.

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.

The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.

I believe it's not only possible to eradicate malaria; I believe it's necessary. Ultimately, the cost of controlling it endlessly is not sustainable. The only way to stop this disease is to end it forever.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

Ridiculous sums of money can be confusing.

We [Corbis] make it so easy to call up images, whether art or people or beaches or sunsets or Nobel Prize winners.

We're at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail; it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most.