Melinda Gates Quotes

The premise of this foundation is one life on this planet is no more valuable than the next.

Deep human connection is ... the purpose and the result of a meaningful life - and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can't get her to come and get them then they won't work.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

I'm constantly saying to myself, 'I'm lucky I was born in the United States.

All of a sudden people in the United States start to realize that vaccines make a difference. The controversy and the myth that's there, we're always trying to bust through that. So when I see a disease outbreak, I say to myself, "OK, that'll get people realizing how lucky we are to have vaccines."

My undergraduate work was in computer science and economics. It just happened to be at that time when 34 percent of computer-science majors were women. We didn't realize it was at the peak at the time.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

Mothers might say they'd go to the doctor. In poor countries, moms are usually responsible for their kids' health. But breastfeeding and traveling to the clinic take time, and research shows that health care is one of the first tradeoffs women make when they're too busy.

Women and girls face a whole host of issues. We start with health, so we work very deeply on maternal deaths, making sure that a mom doesn't die in childbirth, making sure that she has access, for instance, to AIDS medication.

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don't die of diarrhea anymore, but it's a huge problem in the developing world.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we're doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development

I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past.

Government funding that's coming from the United States is making a huge difference on the ground in the developing world. It's really palpable - it's making a huge difference saving lives.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

I'm wholehearted about whatever I do.

Take time to learn about the lives of women around the world-and try to play a small part in their fight to create the future they deserve.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.

We start with an economic approach. We look at what are the greatest causes of death in the developing world, and what causes the largest amount of disability, which would prevent you from getting a job. A lot of those deaths start with diseases, diseases we don't get in such a great number in the United States.

Make sure you continue to trust what you know now about yourself and stay true to what you believe in

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

I'm happy we have three healthy children and we'll stay with three healthy children.

We set out what's going to be our work time versus our foundation time versus family time, and we'll reassess that... sometimes every week.

Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.

Women are the centre of the family. It's the woman who decides what's eaten in the house, when to have the kids vaccinated; everything that has to do with the children's health revolves around her.

If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?'

Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.

The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child's health.

I went to business school, and I went straight from that to a nine-year career at Microsoft. Eventually, I ran a big chunk of the consumer products division for Microsoft.Then I left with the birth of our first daughter because Bill and I both wanted to have a few kids.

What great changes have not been ambitious?

Philanthropy is not about the money. It's about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world.

When we better understand the realities of these women's lives, we are able to design and deliver solutions that are more useful to them.

The fact that 98 percent of women in [the U.S.] who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives.

If you don't invest in the woman, empower her, give her the things she needs to lift her family up, you're just not going to make the progress that you want to make. But if you put her at the centre, you can change a lot for that family, and it has ripple effects through the economy.

Poverty disproportionately affects women around the world.

Like in Africa, if somebody doesn't have fuel, they're still going and collecting firewood. If they get an oven, that's a huge difference. You can do things to reduce the inequities by making sure that they can get clean energy, safe energy. To make sure they're not having to collect water every day. That's huge for women in the developing world.

In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine.

If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It's a man. Who's left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family's well-being - as much as 10 times more.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can't even yet agree on what their laws should be.

If I really believe all lives have equal value, and if I use contraceptives, which I do, and if I'm counselling my son and my two daughters to use them, how am I not serving the women who don't have access to the contraceptives they need?