I believe the government has the right to recover from the heirs to the fortunes of its most successful citizens some portion of those fortunes.
Bill GatesA 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.
Bill GatesPeople think about this idea that there's 122 million kids that are alive that would not be if that fatality rate had stayed at the 1990 level, that's 122 million families.
Bill GatesI know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.[Bill] Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the [George] Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.
Bill GatesIf somebody is considering being willing to go out and work in the field in global health, those are a particular class of heroes because it's hard to work in those places. Our foundation gets so many of our learnings from people who've been out there and seen, "this tool is not going to work there, there's more of a problem here than you know." You should really get involved in that.
Bill GatesThe Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation and they got infected with malaria, and partly cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.
Bill Gates