Bill Gates, born October 28, 1955. Is an American business magnate, philanthropist, and investor. He is best known for co-founding software giant Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen.
Here is a collection of Bill Gates most inspiring quotes: Bill Gates quotes about life, business, ambition, technology, togetherness and love. Bill Gates quotes for students. Quotes and sayings on knowledge, reading, teacher, science, technology, money and dreams by Bill Gates. Bill Gates quotes love your work.
Bill Gates Quotes and Sayings
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.
Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.
If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.
The point is that when we focus on all three things at once - technology, policies, and markets - we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
Patience is a key element of success.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Well, Steve Jobs… I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
The climate is like a bathtub that's slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That's the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions - but not eliminate them - won't do it.
It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.
The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
The cruel injustice is that even though the world's poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they're going to suffer the most from it.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%
If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It's like saying that as of 1932, cars didn't have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.
I believe that if you show people the problems and you show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act.
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It's harmful.
Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.
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.
Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world... if you do so, you are insulting yourself.
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.
The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger.
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.
Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.
We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.
The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.
Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.
So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.
Legacy is a stupid thing! I don't want a legacy.
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
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.
Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.
When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not.
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.
The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.
Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.
If you can't make it good,at least make it look good.
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
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.
The future of advertising is the Internet.
We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
If your culture doesn't like geeks, you are in real trouble.
Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.
Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
It's hard to improve public education - that's clear.
People everywhere love Windows.
Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.
Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.
Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don't think over time that's a good way to go. I'm a huge believe in digital currency... but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I'm not involved in Bitcoin.
There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.
To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.
The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!
I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
The U.S. immigration laws are bad - really, really bad. I'd say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government's name.
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it 'tap-dancing to work.'
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
I'm a geek.
The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.
India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.
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.
What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'
OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me 'Trey' because I'm William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I'm also known.
I do the dishes every night - other people volunteer, but I like the way I do it.
I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it's made by Warren Buffett.
The 'Billionaire' song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny.
In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science - really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
'Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.
The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly 'cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.
The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.
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.
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.
The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
I don't like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.
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.
I get more spam than anyone I know.
Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
Measles will always show you if someone isn't doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.
If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?
Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.
Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career.
Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.
There's 20 companies that I have investments in - some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.
In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?
The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.
For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.
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.
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.
If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.
The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.
If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.
It's easier to add things on to a PC than it's ever been before. It's one click, and boom, it comes down.
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.
It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.
I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'
Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.
Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
The microprocessor is a miracle.
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it's very inexpensive to send mail.
Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.
On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
In the old generation, if one kid bought a PlayStation 2 and the other kid bought an Xbox, at his house you played PlayStation, at your house you played Xbox. Now that it's online, all those early buyers who... you want to play with, they've got their reputation online of who they are and how good they are at these games.
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It's very expensive.
I don't think culture is something you can describe.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.
I don't think there's a... boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.
I'm never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.
Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.
You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.
Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.
I spend a lot of time reading.
The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they'll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.
I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.
I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it's always been a bit complicated.
The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy - even beyond the market opportunities - that's something that appropriately ought to be done.
The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam - those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that's legitimate.
One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn't elect those people. Isn't it supposed to be different? Aren't we supposed to like the people that we elected?
The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.
Google's done a super good job on search; Apple's done a great job on the IPod.
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.
If you're a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you'll never have heard of Bill Gates.
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.
You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.
The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.
I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
The kids are a big part of my schedule.
The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.
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.
What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
Newspaper readership is still growing in India.
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.
The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.
Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.
I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.
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.
Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.
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.
I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it's just such a dramatic success.
There's no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, 'The government's corrupt,' and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.
Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
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.
The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.
I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems.
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it's extremely hard to block anything - extremely hard. You'll never get perfect blocking.
China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it's not an 'us versus them,' it's an 'us and them' type scenario.
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.
Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.
In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.
Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear.
When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.
3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we're getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we've ever had before.
The mainstream is always under attack.
Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.
Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.
When you revolutionize education, you're taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you're priming the pump for so many incredible things.
Playing bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like.
Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.
I don't generally read a lot of fiction.
I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I've learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that's what kids are playing. That's what people are talking about.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.
I don't think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
I think there will be PCs at every price point.
Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.
In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.
My wife thinks she's better than me at puzzles. I haven't given in on that one yet.
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.
According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.
A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.
The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.
We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.
If you count E-mail, I'm on the Internet all day, every day.
China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.
The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it's a good thing they'll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.
Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.
U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.
My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.
There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.
Digital reading will completely take over. It's lightweight and it's fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
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