This [philanthropy] work is even more fascinating. It requires us to think harder about how we build partnerships, who we get behind. And yet we get to see progress that in some ways is even more profound than the great advances that digital technology has provided.

You can make money and you can make excuses, but you can never make money out of excuses

You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs.

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.

In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I'm putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.

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

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.