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.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.

Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes ... Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organization and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.

Contrary to Piketty’s rentier hypothesis, I don’t see anyone on the [Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans] whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending.

Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the program down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they’ll just stick in these checks without thinking about how they might slow the thing down.

Taking a look back, one big reqret is, I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world. The appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemned millions of people to the lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas and economics, and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanities greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.