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.

When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.

[Melinda Gates] is a lot of fun to work with. There's some of the people skills that she's better at and cares about more. It'd be a mistake not to think of her as very numerical and interested in the science. I enjoy, if I get ahead of her, say, understanding the immune system, then we can spend a few hours, where I'm going through how amazing it is and interesting, and how that affects our creating new products, so I've always had a partner.

Hey, size works against excellence.

Our leadership [in Microsoft ] has that - "hey, we are the best in certain ways," and so we get the best people. That any kind of positive dynamic is quite good, so I love what's going on there, it's fun.

At every juncture, advanced tools have been the key to a new wave of applications, and each wave of applications has been key to driving computing to the next level.

50 years from now we won't need as much human labour to do what manual workers do, so we should be able to take that extra productivity and put it to better use.