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One Thing I've Always Loved About The Culture At Microsoft Is There Is Nobody Who Is Tougher On Us, In Terms Of What We Need To Learn And Do Better, Than The People In The Company Itself. You Can Walk Down These Halls, And They'll Tell You, 'we Need To Do Usability Better, Push This Or That Frontier.'

-Bill Gates

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One Thing I've Always

Bill Gates

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One Thing I've Always Loved About The Culture At Microsoft Is There Is Nobody Who Is Tougher On Us, In Terms Of What We Need To Learn And Do Better, Than The People In The Company Itself. You Can Walk Down These Halls, And They'll Tell You, 'we Need To Do Usability Better, Push This Or That Frontier.'

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We’re No Longer In The Days Where Every Program Is Super Well Crafted. But At The Heart Of The Programs That Make It To The Top, You’ll Find That The Key Internal Code Was Done By A Few People Who Really Knew What They Were Doing.

If We Can Find Approaches That Meet The Needs Of The Poor In Ways That Generate Profits For Business And Votes For Politicians, We Will Have Found A Sustainable Way To Reduce Inequity In The World. This Task Is Open-ended. It Can Never Be Finished. But A Conscious Effort To Answer This Challenge Will Change The World.

Often You Have To Rely On Intuition.

Kids Are Taking Pcs And The Internet To New Heights. They're The Ones That Are Designing The Cutting-edge Web Sites.

I Think The Thing We See Is That As People Are Using Video Games More, They Tend To Watch Passive Tv A Bit Less. And So Using The Pc For The Internet, Playing Video Games, Is Starting To Cut Into The Rather Unbelievable Amount Of Time People Spend Watching Tv.

The Outside Perception And Inside Perception Of Microsoft Are So Different. The View Of Microsoft Inside Microsoft Is Always Kind Of An Underdog Thing.

Even With Cameras Being Very Cheap, One Thing That Researchers Noticed Was That You Look Really Bad In A Videoconference Image Because The Lighting Is Bad And You Get Shadows And Things.

We Got A Malaria Initiative, Really A Phenomenal Time, Even Though In The Early Stages There Was Some Uncertainty. Then Of Course [barack] Obama, Although He Had Budget Constraints, He Believed In These Things; A Lot Of New Initiatives, Including In Agriculture.

People Cannot Become Truly Knowledgeable Without Being Excellent Readers.

Bangladesh Is Largely A River Delta, And The Rising Sea Level Means That When Storms Come In, The Human Sanitation Is Backing Up, The Ability To Farm.

The Interview Process Tests Not What The Applicant Knows, But How Well They Can Process Tricky Questions: If You Wanted To Figure Out How Many Times On Average You Would Have To Flip The Pages Of The Manhattan Phone Book To Find A Specific Name, How Would You Approach The Problem? If A Spider Fell To The Bottom Of A 50-foot Well, And Each Day Climbed Up 3 Feet And Slipped Back 2, How Many Days Would It Take The Spider To Get Out Of The Well? .

The Us Really Has To Get Out In Front. We Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute.

Climate Change Is A Terrible Problem, And It Absolutely Needs To Be Solved. It Deserves To Be A Huge Priority.

I Read An Hour Almost Every Night. It's Part Of Falling Asleep.

The World Needs Banking But It Does Not Need Banks.

It Was Really Phenomenal [warren Buffett Donation]. It Grew Out Of The Friendship That We Had And The Fact That His Plan To Have His Wife Run The Foundation And Give Things Away Changed When She Tragically Died.

By 2035, There Will Be Almost No Poor Countries Left In The World.

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.

Flipping Burgers Is Not Beneath Your Dignity. Your Grandparents Had A Different Word For Burger Flipping - They Called It Opportunity.

The Early Personal Computers Were Not Very Powerful So The Idea Of Feeding Their Program Into A Small Amount Of Memory Requires Immense Skill.

I Don't Have Any Tvs With Their Over-the-air Receivers Connected In My House. But When I'm In A Hotel Room Or Other Places That Have A Tv, Then I Turn It On And Flip The Channels Just Like Everybody Else. I'm Not Immune To The Lures Of Television. I Just Try To Stay Away From It Because I Like To Read.

My Mom And My Dad Were Both Very Sociable, Meeting Lots Of Interesting People.

If You Believe That All Men Are Created Equal, Then A Child's Death In Some Other Country Is No Less Tragic Than In The United States.

Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

There Is No Doubt Pc Prices Will Be Coming Down.

The U.s. And Canada Are Two Generous Governments And We Reach Out And Partner With Anyone Who Believes In Foreign Aid.

The Need To Communicate Effectively With Your Customers Will Come Up Again And Again.

In Order To Deal With All The Medical Cost Demands And Other Challenges In The U.s., As We Look To Raise That Revenue, The Rich Will Have To Pay Slightly More. That's Quite Clear.

I'm Quite Worried About The Fiscal Imbalances That We've Got And What That Might Mean In Terms Of Financial Crisis Ahead.

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.

Before You Were Born, Your Parents Weren't As Boring As They Are Now. They Got That Way From Paying Your Bills, Cleaning Your Clothes And Listening To You Talk About How Cool You Thought You Were. So Before You Save The Rain Forest From The Parasites Of Your Parent's Generation, Try Delousing The Closet In Your Own Room.

The Human Body Is The Most Complex System Ever Created. The More We Learn About It, The More Appreciation We Have About What A Rich System It Is.

Only Through Focus Can You Do World-class Things, No Matter How Capable You Are.

How You Gather, Manage, And Use Information Will Determine Whether You Win Or Lose.

This Social-networking Thing Takes You To Crazy Places.

With Nuclear Weapons, You'd Think You Would Probably Stop After Killing 100million. Smallpox Won't Stop. Because The Population Is Naïve, And There Are No Real Preparations. That, If It Got Out And Spread, Would Be A Larger Number.

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.

Www? Nice Toy, But What A Waste Of Time.

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.

If We [microsoft Corporation] Weren't Still Hiring Great People And Pushing Ahead At Full Speed, It Would Be Easy To Fall Behind And Become A Mediocre Company. Fear Should Guide You, But It Should Be Latent. I Have Some Latent Fear. I Consider Failure On A Regular Basis.

I've Said Some Stupid Things And Some Wrong Things, But Not That. No One Involved In Computers Would Ever Say That A Certain Amount Of Memory Is Enough For All Time.

Rules Broken Today Become Norms Tomorrow.

We Work With Whoever Is Elected. Some Will Bring A More Generous, Open View Of The World Than Others.

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.

Competition Is Always A Fantastic Thing, And The Computer Industry Is Intensely Competitive.

The Main Thing That's Missing In Energy Is An Incentive To Create Things That Are Zero-co2-emitting And That Have The Right Scale And Reliability Characteristics.

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.

The Returns From Investing In Poor People Are Just As Great As The Returns From Investing In The Business World... And Have Even More Meaning

I Think That Our Progress On Key Diseases Over The Next Several Decades Is Going To Be Pretty Amazing And So I Am Very Interested In That.

Energy Is Actually Harder; It Takes More Time To Get A Product, But If You Do It's A Very, Very Big Market And The Constraints Of Doing That In A Clean Way Are More Obvious All The Time.

There's A Lot That Can Be Done For People Who Are Using Technology In A Better Way.

I Regret Being The Richest Man In The World Because That Position Attracts Undeserved Publicity.

Should Surveillance Be Usable For Petty Crimes Like Jaywalking Or Minor Drug Possession? Or Is There A Higher Threshold For Certain Information? Those Aren't Easy Questions.

Teaching's Hard! You Need Different Skills: Positive Reinforcement, Keeping Students From Getting Bored, Commanding Their Attention In A Certain Way.

We All Sort Of Do Want Incentives For Creative People To Still Exist At A Certain Level. You Know, Maybe Rock Stars Shouldn't Make As Much; Who Knows? But You Want As Much Creativity To Take Place In The Future As Took Place In The Past.

We're Changing The World With Technology.

Changing The World

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.

In Terms Of Doing Things I Take A Fairly Scientific Approach To Why Things Happen And How They Happen. I Don't Know If There's A God Or Not, But I Think Religious Principles Are Quite Valid.

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 Flatter The Corporate Hierarchy, The More Likely It Is That Employees Will Communicate Bad News And Act Upon It.

You’ve Got To Give Great Tools To Small Teams. Pick Good People, Use Small Teams And Give Them Great Tools So That They Are Very Productive In Terms Of What They Are Doing.

Antitrust Is The Way That The Government Promotes Markets When There Are Market Failures. It Has Nothing To Do With The Idea Of Free Information.

The Government Is There Day In And Day Out, If You Want All Kids To Have Education, If You Want To Run Courts, If You Want To Have An Army, If You Want To Have Roads, You've Got To Have The Taxation System That Funds Everything That You Expect.

Being Able To See An Activity Log Of Where A Kid Has Been Going On The Internet Is A Good Thing.

If You're Asking Whether I Intentionally Mess Up My Hair, No, I Don't. And Certain Things, Like My Freckles, They're Just There. I Don't Do Anything Consciously. I Suppose I Could Get Contact Lenses. I Suppose I Could Comb My Hair More Often.

I Never Took A Day Off In My Twenties. Not One. And I'm Still Fanatical, But Now I'm A Little Less Fanatical.

Really Advanced Civilization Is Based On Advances In Energy.

Advanced Civilization

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.

[melinda Gates] Is A Lot Of Fun To Work With. There's Some Of The People Skills That She's Better At And Cares About More. It'd Be A Mistake Not To Think Of Her As Very Numerical And Interested In The Science. I Enjoy, If I Get Ahead Of Her, Say, Understanding The Immune System, Then We Can Spend A Few Hours, Where I'm Going Through How Amazing It Is And Interesting, And How That Affects Our Creating New Products, So I've Always Had A Partner.

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.

People Who Feared Ibm Were Wrong, ... Technology Is Ever-changing.

If The 1980s Were About Quality And The 1990s Were About Reengineering, Then The 2000s Will Be About Velocity.

While We're All Very Dependent On Technology, It Doesn't Always Work.

Vaccination Is Pretty Special Because You Can Do A Vaccination Campaign Anywhere In The World. All You Are Doing Is Gathering Women From The Villages, Getting Them The Vaccines And Asking Them To Go Around And Find The Children.

Other Paths Would Include Making Nuclear Fission Cheap Enough And Safe Enough That People Broadly Embrace It, So That Could Be Scaled Up.

About Three Million Computers Get Sold Every Year In China, People Don't Pay For The Software. Someday They Will, Though. And As Long As They're 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.

If You're Too Focused On Your Current Business, It's Hard To Change And Concentrate On Innovating.

You Have A Meeting To Make A Decision, Not To Decide On The Question.

The Most Interesting Biofuel Efforts Avoid Using Land That's Expensive And Has High Opportunity Costs. They Do This By Getting Onto Other Types Of Land, Or Taking Advantage Of Byproducts That Aren't Used In The Food Chain Today, Or By Intercropping.

I Choose A Lazy Person To Do A Hard Job. Because A Lazy Person Will Find An Easy Way To Do It.

We Get Comfort From Those Who Agree With Us, But We Get Growth From Only Those Who Don't Agree With Us !

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.

Microsoft Does Not Dominate The Software Industry By Any Stretch Of The Imagination. We Have Lots Of Very Able Competitors Who Keep Us Constantly Vigilant, And Sometimes They Beat Us To The Punch. Microsoft's Success To Date Is Based Solely On The Fact That People Like Microsoft Software.

Students Deserve Great Teachers. And Teachers Deserve The Support They Need To Become Great.

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intellience. All The Nuerons In The Brain That Make Up Perceptions And Emotions Operate In A Binary Fashion.

To Create A New Standard It Takes Something That's Not Just A Little Bit Different. It Takes Something That's Really New And Really Captures People's Imagination. And The Macintosh, Of All The Machines I've Ever Seen, Is The Only One That Meets That Standard.

Security Guys Break The Mac Every Single Day. Every Single Day, They Come Out With A Total Exploit, Your Machine Can Be Taken Over Totally.

A Fundamental New Rule For Business Is That The Internet Changes Everything.

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.

There Is This Broad, Broad Recognition Of How Technology Is Enabling New Things. Companies That Never Paid Attention To Computers In Any Form Now See Digital Technology As Creating Threats And Opportunities For Them.

Well I Think Any Author Or Musician Is Anxious To Have Legitimate Sales Of Their Products, Partly So They're Rewarded For Their Success, Partly So They Can Go On And Do New Things.

The Death Of A Child Is An Incredible Tragedy All Over The World. Back In 1990, About 12 Percent Of Children Were Dying Before They Reached The Age Of 5.

We Have Over 60 Million Machines That Can Take The Same Diskette, Plug It In And Immediately Ah, That That Software's Working. And So It's Created The Worldwide Software Industry That... That Is So Very Competitive And Moving So Quickly.

Microsoft Has Had Its Success By Doing Low-cost Products And Constantly Improving Those Products And We've Really Redefined The It Industry To Be Something That's About A Tool For Individuals.

Going Out In The Field, It's Always Enlightening To See What's Working And What's Not And To Sit Down And Talk - I Was With Young Girls In South Africa - Understanding Why Our Tools For Prevention Aren't Being Adopted, And What Way May Need To Invent To Help Protect Them.

Money Has Always Been In Politics. And I'm Not Sure You'd Want Money To Be Completely Out Of Politics.

Nobody Spends Any Money On Smallpox Unless They Worry About A Bio-terrorist Recreating It.

I Didn't Completed My University Education

University Education

It's Ok For China To Invent Cancer Drugs That Cure Patients In The United States. We Want Them To Catch Up. But As The Leader, We Want To Keep Setting A Very, Very High Standard. We Don't Want Them To Catch Up Because We're Slowing Down Or, Even Worse, Going Into Reverse.

We Paired This Announcement Of The R&d [commitment] With The So-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, Which Is 27 [major Investors] Saying, "hey, We'll Put Significant Money Into [energy Innovations] When They're Ready To Spin Out Probably Into Startup Companies."

Everyone Knows About Black Friday And Cyber Monday. Now Help Me Spread The Word About Giving Tuesday!

I Feel Certain That The Personal Computer Is As Revolutionary In Terms Of The Way It Will Change The Way We Work, Learn, And Entertain Ourselves As Any Of These Previous Advances.

If Something's Expensive To Develop, And Somebody's Not Going To Get Paid, It Won't Get Developed. So You Decide: Do You Want Software To Be Written, Or Not?

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

The Pace Of Progress In Biology Creates A Foundation That Naturally Gets Picked Up By The Biotech And Pharmaceutical Industry To Solve Rich-world Diseases. This Is Attractive Science. It's Science That People Want To Work On.

The World Has Been Very Careful To Pick Very Few Diseases For Eradication, Because It Is Very Tough.

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.

Killing Each Other

Success On The Web Require High-level Corporate Understanding Of The Internet's Capabilities And Support Of Early Test-and-invest Projects.

Let's Face It, The Average Computer User Has The Brain Of A Spider Monkey.

Whether It's Google Or Apple Or Free Software, We've Got Some Fantastic Competitors And It Keeps Us On Our Toes.

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.

If I Only Had Two Dollars Left I Would Spend One Dollar On Pr.

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.

I Set A Rule That People Weren't Allowed To Send Good News Unless They Sent Around An Equal Amount Of Bad News. We Had To Get A Balanced Picture. In Fact, I Kind Of Favored Just Hearing About The Accounts We Were Losing Because ... Bad News Is Generally More Actionable Than Good News.

People Don't Want Lots And Lots Of Single Purpose Devices. They Do Not Want To Have To Learn How To Set Up Something For Photos, Another Thing For Music, Another Thing For Video.

I Believe It’s Not Only Possible To Eradicate Malaria; I Believe It’s Necessary. Ultimately, The Cost Of Controlling It Endlessly Is Not Sustainable. The Only Way To Stop This Disease Is To End It Forever.

I Think There Certainly Was A Milestone In The '90s With Regards To The Internet Achieving Critical Mass. There Were Several Magical Factors That Came Together: The Creation Of Html By Tim Berners-lee, The Drop In The Price Of Communications, And All The Pcs Out There That You Could Put This Software Into.

You've Got To Be Willing To Read Other People's Code, Then Write Your Own, Then Have Other People Review Your Code.

Strategically, A Major Function Of The Ceo Is To Look For Bad News And Encourage The Organization To Respond To It. Employees Must Be Encouraged To Share Bad News As Much As Good News.

Looking At These Issues As A Businessman, I Believe That Investing In The World's Poorest People Is The Smartest Way That Our Government Spends Money.

The Present And Future Of Knowledge Attainment And Essential Business Skills.

You Might Say, Well, Aren't People Saying That About Wind And Solar Today? Not Really. Only In The Super-narrow Sense That The Capital Costs Per Output, When The Wind Is Blowing, Is Slightly Lower.

It's Fantastic That Microsoft In The Cloud Space Is One Of Very Few Companies That's Got The Critical Mass, The Particular Emphasis On Helping Business Customers Get Up To That Cloud With All The Unique Requirements They Have. It's Very Exciting.

The Barrier To Change Is Not Too Little Caring; It Is Too Much Complexity. To Turn Caring Into Action, We Need To See A Problem, See A Solution, And See The Impact. But Complexity Blocks All Three Steps.

China Is Certainly An Important Player In The Global Economy, And A Widespread Aids Epidemic Would Threaten That Growth.

Here At Work We're All Just Trying To Get A Job Done. My People Have The Confidence Of Their Convictions And They Know Their Skills. And That Occupies Most Of My Time.

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.

Bitcoin Is A Technological Tour De Force

I Was Lucky To Be Involved And Get To Contribute To Something That Was Important, Which Is Empowering People With Software.

The Only Role Other Than Paying Their Taxes, Whatever Those Are, The Only Role For Philanthropy Broadly - Of Which The Rich Should Give Disproportionately - The More, The Better - And I Think There Is A Positive Trend In That Direction - There Are Certain Risk-taking Things, Like Trying Out A New Type Of Charter School Or Funding A New Kind Of Medicine.

The Part Of Uranium That's Fissile - When You Hit It With A Neutron, It Splits In Two - Is About 0.7%. The Reactors We Have Today Are Burning That 0.7%.

Energy Is Very Primal Stuff And There Are A Lot Of Leads That Are Promising, Still At A Fairly Risky Stage, But Over The Next Decade Some Of These Breakthrough Approaches Are Going To Pay Out, And U.s. Research And U.s. Leadership On This Should Be Part Of How It Gets Solved.

I Can Understand Wanting To Have A Million Dollars But Once You Get Beyond That, I Have To Tell You, It's The Same Hamburger.

In The Old Generation, If One Kid Bought A Playstation 2 And The Other Kid Bought An Xbox, At His House You Played Playstation, At Your House You Played Xbox. Now That It's Online, All Those Early Buyers Who... You Want To Play With, They've Got Their Reputation Online Of Who They Are And How Good They Are At These Games.

America's High Schools Are Obsolete. By Obsolete, I Don't Just Mean That They're Broken, Flawed, Or Underfunded, Though A Case Could Be Made For Every One Of Those Points. By Obsolete, I Mean Our High Schools-even When They're Working As Designed-cannot Teach All Our Students What They Need To Know Today.

If We Think Long Term, The Younger Generation Here Is Better About Embracing The World. Not Seeing Countries Boundaries Kind Of An "us Versus Them" Thing.

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.

We're In A Period Of Uncertainty About [donald Trump] Administration Policies And The Range Of What Might Happen Is Particularly Higher. I Don't Think That These R&d And Innovation Budgets Will Be Substantially Reduced.

Even When I Wrote Basic Myself The Day Before I Burned It Into A Computer I Wasn't Making Design Changes. I Didn't Have A Testing Team. I Did All The Testing Myself. And There Was No Project Methodology Or Schedule That, There Was The Notion Of Coming To A Close Means Testing A Lot At The End And Making Very Few Changes.

In This Business, By The Time You Realize You're In Trouble, It's Too Late To Save Yourself. Unless You're Running Scared All The Time, You're Gone.

Funny Inspirational

Solutions To All Biological Problems Are Greatly Advanced By The Sequencing Work And The New Tools That Are Created.

Bridge Is One Of The Last Games In Which The Computer Is Not Better.

I Want To Admit That I Am An Optimist. Any Tough Problem, I Think It Can Be Solved.

Microsoft Was Founded With A Vision Of A Computer On Every Desk, And In Every Home. We've Never Wavered From That Vision.

Microsoft's Only Factory Asset Is The Human Imagination.

I Love Nuclear. It Does This Radiation Thing That's Tricky. But They're Good Solutions. You Know, It Was Interesting; Recently, In Connecticut This Natural Gas Plant Blew Up 11 Guys. It Just Blew Them Up.

The World Is Very Disparate, In Terms Of The Us Using The Most Energy Per Person, And Then The Other Rich Countries - Europe, Japan, New Zealand - Using About Half Of What We Do, And Then The World Average Being About A Fifth Of What We Use, With China Just Now Surpassing The World Average.

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.

The Bulk Of The Universities Are About Teaching Kids.

The Aids Is A Disease That Is Hard To Talk About.

We Need A Malaria Epidemic In The Blogging Community! Either That Or We Need People Who Have Seen The Malaria Epidemic To Start Blogging.

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.

Until Recently, Over 98 Percent Of Teachers Just Got One Word Of Feedback: Satisfactory. If All My Bridge Coach Ever Told Me Was That I Was 'satisfactory,' I Would Have No Hope Of Ever Getting Better.

Living On $6 A Day Means You Have A Refrigerator, A Tv, A Cell Phone, Your Children Can Go To School. That's Not Possible On $1 A Day.

There Is A Difference Between What Technology Enables And What Historical Business Practices Enable.

Melinda [gates] Has Been My Partner In Raising The Kids And I Went From Before I Met Her, Intentionally Having An Unbalanced Life, To Having A More Balanced Life With All Sorts Of Fun Things That She And I Do Together.

When You Say That After World War I There Was A Pandemic That Killed More People Than The War Itself, Most Will Say: "wait, Are You Kidding? I Know World War I, But There Was No World War 1.5, Was There?" But People Were Traveling Around After The War, And That Meant The Force Of Infection Was Much Higher. And The Problem Is That The Rate Of Travel Back Then Was Dramatically Less Than What We Have Nowadays.

I Know That Historically Our Foundation Has Had Great Relations With All The Administrations.[bill] Clinton Administration Did A Lot Of Outreach. The Greatest Rise In U.s. Foreign Aid Was Under The [george] Bush Administration, That's Where We Got The Aids Initiative, Which Is Called Pepfar.

Ninety Percent Of The Cases Of Polio Are In Security-vulnerable Areas.

Microsoft Has Had Many, Many Successful Products. I'm Committed To One Company. This Is The Industry I've Decided To Work In.

Life Is A Lot More Fun If You Treat Its Challenges In Creative Ways.

There's No Magic Line Between An Application And An Operating System That Some Bureaucrat In Washington Should Draw.

We're Creating This Alliance, Gavi, That Has Helped Buy The Vaccines That Were In The Rich World But Not Getting To The Poor Kids, Getting A Very Cheap Price And Figuring Out The Cold Chain, Getting The Delivery Right, And Then Funding Research For New Vaccines. A Lot Of Them Are Coming Along. We've Got A Meningitis Vaccine Out, Got That Through Large Parts Of Africa. That Has Been A Huge Success.

I Think If You Talk To The Experts In Any Field Where You Have To Take On A Unknown Challenge, Where You're Going To Be Working On It For A Long Time You'd Find That To Work Themselves Up To Their Best Performance And Really Throw Themselves Into It, You Know, Spend All These Hours In There And Ah, Give It Their... Give It Their Best That Optimism Plays A Role.

China Has Many Successful Entrepreneurs And Business People. I Hope That More People Of Insight Will Put Their Talents To Work To Improve The Lives Of Poor People In China And Around The World, And Seek Solutions For Them.

There Is No Author Whose Books I Look Forward To More Than Vaclav Smil.

From The Day Microsoft Was Started, The Only Constraint To Our Growth Has Been Attracting Ah, More Great Programmers, Very Smart, Committed, Ah, People. And So We're Always On... On The Look For Ah, That Kind Of Person.

Cutting Through Complexity To Find A Solution Runs Through Four Predictable Stages: Determine A Goal, Find The Highest-leverage Approach, Discover The Ideal Technology For That Approach, And In The Meantime, Make The Smartest Application Of The Technology That You Already Have - Whether It's Something Sophisticated, Like A Drug, Or Something Simpler, Like A Bednet.

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering.

Information Work Is Thinking Work.

Given How Few Young People Actually Read The Newspaper, It's A Good Thing They'll Be Reading A Newspaper On A Screen.

The Government's Ability To Select Scientists And Pick Things That Are Fairly Strange, Because Politicians Don't Like Failures. They're Only In Office A Short Term, And Many Of These Things Take A Long Time.

Investing In Tomorrow's Technology Today Is More Critical Than Ever.

The Barrier To Change Is Not Too Little Caring; It Is Too Much Complexity.

There's Nobody Getting Rich Writing Software That I Know Of.

Nobody Believes In Completely Unadulterated Capitalism.

We're All Responsible For Creating A Polio-free World While We Still Can.

I Would Counsel People To Go To College, Because It's One Of The Best Times In Your Life In Terms Of Who You Meet And Develop A Broad Set Of Intellectual Skills.

The World At Large Is Less Inequitable Today Than At Any Time In History. Number Of People In Abject Poverty, As A Percentage, Is At All-time Low.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk].

In The Same Way That When The Car Got Going, People Thought It Would Be An Electric Car, People Thought It Would Be A Steam Car. Actually, The Dark Horse In That Race Was Internal Combustion, But Because Of The Energy Density Of Gasoline And Discovery Of Oil In Large Amounts At That Point In First Pennsylvania And Then Texas, It Won Out Over Those Other Two, To The Point That Those Other Two Are Actually Viewed As Obscure Footnotes In History.

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.

Most Of Our Competitors Were One-product Wonders... They Would Do Their One Product, But Never Get Their Engineering Sorted Out.

Who Decides What's In Windows? The Customers Who Buy It.

I Don't Believe In Creating Dynastic Wealth. I Don't Really Believe That In A Society That Aspires To Be Meritocratic And That Believes In Equality Of Opportunity - My Kids Have Had Advantage Over 99 Percent Of The Kids In The Country.

The Internet Is The Easiest Thing To Get Into. To Be An Internet Retailer, You Just Get That Url.

Hey, Size Works Against Excellence.

The Job Was To Put Into A, A Computer With Only 4k Of Memory An Entire Basic Full Blown, Floating Point Basic And That's One Of The Greatest Programming Feats I've Ever Had A Chance To Work On.

If Your Business Is Not On The Internet, Then Your Business Will Be Out Of Business.

Network Marketing

In The Next 15 Years, We Can Halve Childhood Deaths. That's Doable.

We All Learn Best In Our Own Ways. Some People Do Better Studying One Subject At A Time, While Some Do Better Studying Three Things At Once. Some People Do Best Studying In Structured, Linear Way, While Others Do Best Jumping Around, Surrounding A Subject Rather Than Traversing It. Some People Prefer To Learn By Manipulating Models, And Others By Reading.

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?'

The Idea Of Explaining Why Free Trade Is Good, Why Immigration Is Good, Why The World Is So Connected, That We Need To Think In Terms Of Humanity And Being Generous To Each Other, You Know, That's Proving To Be A Challenge.

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.

Why Do People Benefit In Inverse Proportion To Their Need? Well, Market Incentives Make That Happen.

U.k. Companies Are In Very International And Very Competitive Markets. If You Look At Pc Penetration In The U.k., It Is Very Similar To The United States Market.

We Need To Get A Broader Awareness. People Say Climate Change Is Really Bad, But Painting That Picture Of What You're Putting At Risk.

I Realized About 10 Years Ago That My Wealth Has To Go Back To Society. A Fortune, The Size Of Which Is Hard To Imagine, Is Best Not Passed On To One's Children. It's Not Constructive For Them.

People Always Fear Change. People Feared Electricity When It Was Invented, Didn't They?

My Parents Are Very Successful, And I Went To The Nicest Private School In The Seattle Area. I Was Lucky. But I Never Had Any Trust Funds Of Any Kind, Though My Dad Did Pay My Tuition At Harvard, Which Was Quite Expensive.

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Sheryl Sandberg

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Salmon P. Chase

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