Bill Gates Quotes

Anything that someone's interested in should be very, very easy to call up onto the screen. And in fact the computer over time will see what you're interested in and make that immediately available without your having to be give any commands at all.

So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side.

More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.

Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.

We [US] are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute. This is another issue where hopefully we will take a long-term approach which, even though we sometimes have a hard time doing that, it's easier for us, as a rich country with this kind of scientific depth, than it is for the poor countries who will suffer the problems.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

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.

Scientists and companies weren't creating things like new vaccines. Now that we have this fund that's there to buy at the lowest price, but buy for those people these medicines, we see scientists everywhere coming up with those new tools.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.

We were young, but we had good advice and good ideas and lots of enthusiasm.

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

The term, information at your fingertips, is to remind people what a broad role the personal computer will be playing. It's not a computation device, it's not a word processing or a spreadsheet device. It's a window onto the world of information.

One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

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.

The need to communicate effectively with your customers will come up again and again.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.

It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

I can understand wanting to have a million dollars but once you get beyond that, I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges.

I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.

I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.

Students deserve great teachers. And teachers deserve the support they need to become great.

I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

There's life and death in every email.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest. The potential of a big financial return for innovation unleashes a broad set of talented people in pursuit of many different discoveries. This system, driven by self-interest, is responsible for the incredible innovations that have improved so many lives.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it's made by Warren Buffett.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.

At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.

The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel market forces, including innovation that's tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

Playing Bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like... I do the dishes every night - other people volunteer but I like the way I do it.

In the US in the 1900's 60 % of people were employed on the farms. Today it's less than 1%. If you told people back then that this would happen they wouldn't have believed it. If you told them we would have therapy, massages and spas that played important parts in our lives they would've have believed us.

The fact that there was no catastrophic pandemic in recent history does not mean there won't be another one. And we are certainly not prepared for the next pandemic.

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

Microsoft does not dominate the software industry by any stretch of the imagination. We have lots of very able competitors who keep us constantly vigilant, and sometimes they beat us to the punch. Microsoft's success to date is based solely on the fact that people like Microsoft software.

People can criticize Microsoft for supporting this TV thing for the past eight years, but it is a long-term bet, There is not any other software business that is as dedicated to the vision of the TV and the PDA [personal digital assistant] as we are.

I think if you talk to the experts in any field where you have to take on a unknown challenge, where you're going to be working on it for a long time you'd find that to work themselves up to their best performance and really throw themselves into it, you know, spend all these hours in there and ah, give it their... give it their best that optimism plays a role.