Bill Gates Quotes

Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.

Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

Whatever they announce, they announce. They're in their honeymoon period, and anything they announce gets hype ... They will obviously branch out beyond Internet search, but I think the expectations won't live up to reality.

We had planned to integrate a Web browser with our operating system as far back as 1993( filing its first court responses to federal antitrust)

We believe unbelievable progress can be made, in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them.

There's no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, 'The government's corrupt,' and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

At every juncture, advanced tools have been the key to a new wave of applications, and each wave of applications has been key to driving computing to the next level.

In terms of fast food and deep understanding of the culture of fast food, I'm your man.

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.

If I hadn't given my money away, I'd have had more than anyone else on the planet.

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.

When you say that after World War I there was a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself, most will say: "Wait, are you kidding? I know World War I, but there was no World War 1.5, was there?" But people were traveling around after the war, and that meant the force of infection was much higher. And the problem is that the rate of travel back then was dramatically less than what we have nowadays.

The only definition by which Americas best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back to the company.

The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.

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.

It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof.

Two years from now, spam will be solved.

Information work is thinking work.

Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'

Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

We weren't trying to just go public and get rich. There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we'd sort of put one foot in front of the other.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn't make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.

It is hard to sell Congress and the American people on foreign aid. Is it harder to do that than it is to sell billionaires on the idea that they should give all their money away.

I don't think culture is something you can describe.

The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.

The potential financial reward for building the 'next Windows' is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

A company's ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

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

We have completely eradicated smallpox; we have almost eradicated polio. That's the miracle of vaccines, which is even greater than that of antibiotics.

To succeed, you also have to know how to make choices and how to think more broadly.

An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.

Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.

R&D generally has been a bipartisan thing, because in the IT space, in the medical space, the U.S., the benefits to ourselves and the world and our economy have been very, very clear. I'm hopeful we can make a very strong case there. Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.

We work with whoever is elected. Some will bring a more generous, open view of the world than others.

The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.