The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.

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

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

The US spends more on energy R&D than all other countries put together, and I personally consider it quite inadequate.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

I was announcing to the public, in 2006, that I'd be leaving Microsoft in a couple of years and focusing full-time on the foundation. That was the time at which we went back to New York and Warren [Buffett] announced these gifts to a number of foundations, with a very high percentage of it going to us and basically doubling our capacity.

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