Quotes by Melinda Gates

If we don't empower women, we don't allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

When women can decide whether and when to have children, it saves lives, promotes health, expands education, and creates prosperity--no matter what country in the world you're talking about.

Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.

The United States is one of only eight countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave…This is startling evidence that the United States is far behind the rest of the world in honoring the needs of families.

What I realized much later, paradoxically, is that by trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like I didn't fit in.

If you can't travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you're making.

There's a false perception that women in Africa somehow don't love their babies they way we do, don't grieve their loss the way we would. That is simply not true.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it's increasingly girls, not boys, who don't know how to read.

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

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.

When these barriers are broken and opportunities open up, they not only lift women out of poverty; they can elevate women to equality with men in every culture and every level of society. No other single change can do more to improve the state of the world.

Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings.

The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don't honor the lives of employees outside the workplace. That can make the workplace a hostile place--because it pits your work against your family in a contest one side has to lose.

Today in the US, we're sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads--set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work.

The decision to outlaw contraceptives was made for women by men.

What great changes have not been ambitious?

I felt suicidal. I couldn't stop crying. I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if the car crashed and I died?

Contraceptives save the lives of mothers and newborns. Contraceptives also reduce abortion. As a result of contraceptive use, there were 26 million fewer unsafe abortions in the world's poorest countries in just one year, according to the most recent data.

In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.

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

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.

With economic opportunity, sometimes it's making sure that if they're not in a place where they can have good jobs, that when they have economic opportunity, they have digital tools to use.

Gender bias does worldwide damage. It's a cause of low productivity on farms. It's a source of poverty and disease. It's at the core of social customs that keep women down.

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

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

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.

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?'

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.

Despite the debunking, you have a small group in the last five years that hasn't wanted to vaccinate their children, for instance, for measles. Then, all of sudden, we got an outbreak of measles and kids were starting to die from measles.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

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.

Now, as smartphones are coming up, there are all kinds of apps that will start to be developed that will help women.

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.

As a parent, the responsible thing to do -- if you love your child -- is to vaccinate your child.

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?

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

It's the mark of a backward society -- or a society moving backward -- when decisions are made for women by men.

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.

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.

Bill and I both firmly believe that even the most difficult global health problems can be solved.

contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.

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.

Everyone agrees that the failure of our high schools is tragic. It's bad business, and it's bad policy. But we act as if it can't be helped. It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them.

Helping people doesn't have to be an unsound financial strategy.

We started our foundation because we believe we have a real opportunity to help advance equity around the world, to help make sure that, no matter where a person is born, he or she has the chance to live a healthy, productive life.

In places like India with smartphones, there's an app now for women if they're in a violent situation, they can press one button. They've given their cell-phone number to five trusted friends, and right away their GPS location goes out: Here I am.

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

Sanitation issues in the developing world affect women more than they affect men.

All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones.

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.

Around the world we have girls in primary school at about the same rate now as boys, but keeping them in quality secondary schools is where the world is lagging. I'm seeing a lot of countries look at this now.

If you don't have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won't change the trajectory for students.

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.

Vaccines are a miracle cure. Eight out of 10 children are getting vaccines.

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.

That's what listening does. It opens you up. It draws out your love -- and love is more urgent than doctrine.

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.

Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men. … I believe without question that the disrespect for women embodied male-dominated religion is a factor in laws and customs that keep women down.

What extreme poverty really means is that no matter how hard you work, you're trapped. You can't get out. Your efforts barely matter. You've been left behind by those who could life you up.

If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.

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

If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.

Connect deeply with others. Our humanity is the one thing that we all have in common.

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.

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

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

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

You can't save kids just with vaccines.

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.

Women around the world should have a tool that helps them plan their pregnancies.

Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh.

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.

We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.

We talk a lot in our home together about where we're going, what I'm doing.

I want to live as private a life as I can because of our children.

I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

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