Quotes by Bill Gates
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I believe the government has the right to recover from the heirs to the fortunes of its most successful citizens some portion of those fortunes.

The world is progressing and resources are becoming more abundant. I'd rather go into a grocery store today than a king's banquet a hundred years ago.

Technology must be implemented as part of a thoughtful, holistic approach to education transformation that includes teacher training, relevant curricula, parental involvement, and programs for children that fill unmet needs for basics like nutrition and health care.

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

Success on the Web require high-level corporate understanding of the Internet's capabilities and support of early test-and-invest projects.

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.

You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch.

I'm quite worried about the fiscal imbalances that we've got and what that might mean in terms of financial crisis ahead.

Often you have to rely on intuition.

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

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

I know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.Bill Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the George Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.

You always overestimate what you can get done in a year and underestimate what you can get done in 10 years.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

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.

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.

The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.

As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.

Thanks to quality education, Israel is one of the most advanced countries in the world .. Israel is advancing in high-tech even more than other developed countries.

The close relationships we form between researchers and product groups have already shown we can move the great ideas as they come along, without a schedule, into the products.

No more misquoted forms, lost invoices, redundant entries, missing checks, or delays caused by incomplete paperwork.

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

The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on.

As we get robots becoming more sophisticated, I think we should worry sooner rather than later on how much they could take over, but I think it'll mostly be a positive thing. In terms of deadlines it won't be any worse than nuclear weapons.

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

With a public library card in your hand, you have access to the Internet and a world of opportunities.

In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation's future.

I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.

The scientific understanding of some of these childhood diseases is advancing quite rapidly. There's some things like premature birth or nutrition, first day deaths that we need a lot more insights so that we can build the tools to solve those problems.

How much further beyond basic research the role of the government should be, you could have a really good debate about it. Almost nobody would say it's zero. But that's where at least we need the private sector to play a big role.

Robotics and other combinations will make the world pretty fantastic compared with today.

If you want to build a great company, get the hell out of Silicon Valley.

I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works.

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.

The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill.

Test scores aren't perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries -- a lot of which are in Africa -- and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

The Ebola epidemic can serve as an early warning wake-up call to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.

Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company.

Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

It is really gratifying, for example, to visit India now and see that because they've had good educational institutions, and they've had a focus on it, there are more and more people in India participating in the world economy.

Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn't try to make every decision.

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.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize in positive ways to help society.

Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people.

The world today has 6.8 billion people...that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.

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.

In 1990, one in 10 children died before the age of five. That's now down to one in 20, and vaccines were the single biggest factor in that. Had it stayed at 10 percent, 122 million more children would have died.

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

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.

In fact, batteries haven't improved over the last 100 years as much as they would need to in order to make that happen. So I'm invested in a lot of battery companies -- and there's a lot that exists I'm not in. They're all having a tough time achieving it.

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

You've got to give great tools to small teams. Pick good people, use small teams and give them great tools so that they are very productive in terms of what they are doing.

Contraception really shouldn't be all that controversial because it's a tool a woman can use to delay her first birth until she's, say, 18 or 19 years old.

Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.

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.

And knowledge management is a means, not an end.

My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier.

I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But many others were also in the same place. The difference was that I took action.

People cannot become truly knowledgeable without being excellent readers.

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.

To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!

To be a good professional engineer, always start to study late for exams because it teaches you how to manage time and tackle emergencies.

If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not.

Leaders are those who empower others.

Something like Windows is still an unbelievable asset but because the world is somewhat phone-centric, it's an asset that has to be managed very carefully to make sure that it's extended, and there are very interesting things that are being done with that.

Investing in tomorrow's technology today is more critical than ever.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

Vision without execution is daydreaming.

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.

Two years from now, spam will be solved.

My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers. So I am constantly getting these notices telling me I haven't paid something when really it is just on the wrong computer.

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.

Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now.

Competition is always a fantastic thing, and the computer industry is intensely competitive.

I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt... They made their way through the machine... A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

Kenya's M-Pesa proves that when people are empowered, they will use digital tech to innovate on their own behalf.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It's like saying that as of 1932, cars didn't have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.

I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.

There is competition, .. Can any Microsoft endure future competition without innovation? The answer is no. We've got to keep changing.

Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority.

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).

(In response to Java) Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong.