Bill Gates Quotations

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

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.

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.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

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.

You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

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.

If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

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.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

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

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

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

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence.

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

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?'

Google's done a super good job on search; Apple's done a great job on the IPod.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The 'Billionaire' song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny.

The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

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.

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

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

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

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

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

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

I get more spam than anyone I know.

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.

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.

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.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me 'Trey' because I'm William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I'm also known.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

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

For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.

The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

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

Legacy is a stupid thing! I don't want a legacy.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

I don't think there's a... boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly 'cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

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.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

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.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam - those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that's legitimate.

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

Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I've learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that's what kids are playing. That's what people are talking about.

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.

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.

It's easier to add things on to a PC than it's ever been before. It's one click, and boom, it comes down.

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.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

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

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!