Bill Gates Years Quotations

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.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

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.

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.

There's 20 companies that I have investments in - some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

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.

The first five years have so much to do with how the next 80 turn out.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

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

In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

I have $100 billion… You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime…

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic.

On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved far for years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.

Over 80% of the poor are people who have small plots of land and grow their own food and they don't grow enough to sell much into the marketplace. So they will be hit hard by the worst in climate. They really get hit hard starting in the 20-year time frame and thereafter.

That's the part where the governments have a unique role, and then when it progresses well enough, then existing companies or new startup companies should take it. In the $3 trillion a year energy market, the rewards will be quite fantastic.

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.

Our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium - the 99.3 percent that's cheap as heck, and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah, Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years. You're taking that and you are converting it to plutonium (humorously under his breath) - and then you're burning that.

I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.

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

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.

People can criticize Microsoft for supporting this TV thing for the past eight years, but it is a long-term bet, There is not any other software business that is as dedicated to the vision of the TV and the PDA [personal digital assistant] as we are.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.

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

Two years from now, spam will be solved.

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.

Microsoft is always two years away from failure.

The Chinese are clearly inculcating the idea that science is exciting and important, and that's why they, as a whole-they're graduating four times as many engineers as we are, and that's just happened over the last 20 years.

... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!

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.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

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.

Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.

There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't. It took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less.

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?

We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

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.

In the next 15 years, we can halve childhood deaths. That's doable.

India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities.

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.

The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.

The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area.

Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?