Bill Gates Quotes

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.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

I didn’t used to wear a watch. Now I have a SPOT watch, which I wear all the time.

China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.

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 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.

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.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

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 nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

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

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

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.

The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.

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.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.

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.

Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it’s always been a bit complicated.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

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.

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.’

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.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral.

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.

I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

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.

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.

Measles will always show you if someone isn’t doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.

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.

The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users’ experience.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

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.

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.

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.

Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.

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.

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.

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

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.

I’m a geek.

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.

My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they’re not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn’t interested.

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.

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.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

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.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

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.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents.

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.

I do the dishes every night – other people volunteer, but I like the way I do it.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

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.

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

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.

Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

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.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

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’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

For Africa to move forward, you’ve really got to get rid of malaria.

One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‘We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.’

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

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

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

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.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

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.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

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.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.

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.

Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.

I get more spam than anyone I know.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

I don’t think there’s a… boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.

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.

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.

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

Our teachers deserve better feedback.

The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.

In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.

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.

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.

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.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

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.

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

People everywhere love Windows.

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

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

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.

Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.

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.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

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.

The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.

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.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

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.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

I spend a lot of time reading.

We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

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.

Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

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.

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

Teaching’s hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

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

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.

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.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

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.

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.

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.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

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.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

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.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

I’m an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.

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.

Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

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

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.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

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.

Common Core is a big win for education.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

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

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.

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.

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.

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.

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 don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

I’m going to retain a lot of Microsoft’s stock.

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.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‘I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.’ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

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.

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.

Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

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.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

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.

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.

The future of advertising is the Internet.

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.

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.

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

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Africa is on the rise.

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

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.

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

I am results-oriented.