I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

Our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium - the 99.3 percent that's cheap as heck, and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah, Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years. You're taking that and you are converting it to plutonium - and then you're burning that.

With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country.

We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.

Most of our competitors were one-product wonders... They would do their one product, but never get their engineering sorted out.

[Melinda Gates] is a lot of fun to work with. There's some of the people skills that she's better at and cares about more. It'd be a mistake not to think of her as very numerical and interested in the science. I enjoy, if I get ahead of her, say, understanding the immune system, then we can spend a few hours, where I'm going through how amazing it is and interesting, and how that affects our creating new products, so I've always had a partner.

I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.