We need to start thinking about the future of food if we are going to feed 9 billion people in a way that does not destroy our environment.

In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.

If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'