Quotes by Bill Gates
(Page 5 of 6)

Common Core is a big win for education.

I don't like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.

Our teachers deserve better feedback.

I'm going to retain a lot of Microsoft's stock.

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy -- even beyond the market opportunities -- that's something that appropriately ought to be done.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.

I've always been interested in science -- one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.

Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses -- it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn't necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.

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

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

Although I don't have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.

There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can't type. They can't create documents.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career.

I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.

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.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

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.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top -- I'm afraid that's not quite right.

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.

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 mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

I have a nice office. I have a nice house... So I'm not denying myself some great things. I just don't happen to have expensive hobbies.

We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

When you revolutionize education, you're taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you're priming the pump for so many incredible things.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn't want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events -- Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima -- so it's more visible.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

I get more spam than anyone I know.

Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?

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

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

Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

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?'

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.

Measles will always show you if someone isn't doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

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.

It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'

Philanthropy should be voluntary.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.