Bill Gates Quotes

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

I hope someday what people can do with their lives depends on their talents and how hard they are willing to work, rather than on where they happen to be born.

If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Your customers get better when you do.

You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.

If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.

My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

I read an hour almost every night. It's part of falling asleep.

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

It's energy intensification, where we essentially have, through our light bulbs and cars, the manpower of [hundreds of] people working on our behalf, helping our food being created, helping our materials like steel and plastic and wood and paper be created. Our lifestyles are incredibly energy intense.

Computers and games don't waste time - people do.

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

The microprocessor is a miracle.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things.

Vision without execution is daydreaming.

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

Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.

Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.

If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I'd spend it on PR!

Software was changing so fast, so unbelievable, that that got very quick adoption.

I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems.

I am not in competition with anyone but myself. My goal is to improve myself continuously.

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

The government is somewhat inept, but the private sector is inept in general. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them. However, every once in a while a Google or a Microsoft comes out, so people keep giving them money.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.

If you're smart, you often want a feedback loop so you know if what you've done is... is right.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

All lives have equal value. And so you say, 'why do poor children die when other children don't? Why do some people have enough nutrition or reasonable toilets and other people don't?' So those basic needs that, through innovation, actually it's very affordable to bring them...to everyone.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have - whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.