If we [Microsoft Corporation] weren't still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company. Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.

Melinda [Gates] has been my partner in raising the kids and I went from before I met her, intentionally having an unbalanced life, to having a more balanced life with all sorts of fun things that she and I do together.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

We are seeing smarter philanthropy, more philanthropy, and that's true world wide. So it's kind of a movement that has a lot of accomplishments, even though as a percentage of the economy, it's still only a few per cent.

In the U.S., we believe the best way to improve lives is to improve public education.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.