Bill Gates Quotes

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

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”

“The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.”

“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.”

“Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.”

“Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.”

“The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of people who see that better ways are available; thanks to technology.”

“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”

“At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.”

“If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web.”

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

“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.”

“Getting the word out that, yes vaccines are great, the safety data's very, very clear, including any of these specific concerns, that's very important to our foundation.”

“Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it.”

“Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well motivated individual.”

“If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially would be the best thing you could do for them.”

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

“I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.”

“When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.”

“I studied every thing but never topped.... But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees”

“If you've found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.”

“My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.”

“In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren [Buffett] things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.”

“Perhaps I should be flattered that somebody imagines the name is worth so much, especially since my parents gave me the same name 42 years ago for free.”

“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.”