In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.

If we're going to make progress on this issue [of contraception], we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future.

You are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

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.

Women and girls should be able to determine their own future, no matter where they're born.

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."

Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.