Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.

It’s been proven that of all the interventions to reduce poverty, improving agricultural productivity is the best.

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.

Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.

When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to - by 1990 it was down to 10% - now it's down to 5%. And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution? It's really energy intensity.

If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we're making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.