Bill Gates Leadership Quotations

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.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

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

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.

Leaders are those who empower others.

All lives have equal value. And so you say, 'why do poor children die when other children don't? Why do some people have enough nutrition or reasonable toilets and other people don't?' So those basic needs that, through innovation, actually it's very affordable to bring them...to everyone.

Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn't try to make every decision.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.

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

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

If we hope to maintain our economic and intellectual leadership in the U.S., we must renew this commitment. Unless there is reform, American competitiveness will suffer as other countries benefit from the international talent that U.S. employers cannot hire or retain.

There's really only one that they've done a leadership thing in, which is in search, and search today is very poor compared to what it will be even a year or two years from now -- their search, our search, everybody's search. So there's so much room to do better, to have that work well with the other offerings.

The idea that you can find your friends, you can talk, you can see who's the best, you can have contests - it's redefining how gamers think of the machine, it's making it more social. As we spread this idea across all our products, that's where we'll take the leadership role.