The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

People everywhere love Windows.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.

One thing I've always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they'll tell you, 'We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.'

If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.

The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.