When I say "miracle" I mean a kind of thing like a computer on a chip, or the internet, or the cellphone, that are really quite miraculous. Most people would not have predicted them, and their effect has been very, very dramatic.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.