It is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities...on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but your humanity.

Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.

If your culture doesn't like geeks, you are in real trouble.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.