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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.

-Bill Gates

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The World Is Progressing

Bill Gates

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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.

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In Poor Countries, We Still Need Better Ways To Measure The Effectiveness Of The Many Government Workers Providing Health Services. They Are The Crucial Link Bringing Tools Such As Vaccines And Education To The People Who Need Them Most. How Well Trained Are They? Are They Showing Up To Work?

When You Write A Piece Of Software You Assume A Certain Type Of Hardware. If You Assume Hardware That's Too Powerful Then You Can't Sell Many Copies Cause Very Few People Have That Machine. If You Assume Hardware That's Too Simple Your Product Can't Do As Much.

You Can't Have A Rigid View That All New Taxes Are Evil.

There Are People Who Don't Like Capitalism, And People Who Don't Like Pcs. But There's No-one Who Likes The Pc Who Doesn't Like Microsoft.

More And More Software Would Just Increase The Number Of Tasks That The Computer Would Help Solve.

Microsoft Research Has A Thing Called The Sense Cam That, As You Walk Around, It's Taking Photos All The Time. And The Software Will Filter And Find The Ones That Are Interesting Without Having To Think, 'let's Get Out The Camera And Get That Shot.' You Just Have That, And Software Helps You Pick What You Want.

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.

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

Harnessing Steam Power Required Many Innovations, As William Rosen Chronicles In The Book 'the Most Powerful Idea In The World.'

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

The Genius Of Capitalism Lies In Its Ability To Make Self-interest Serve The Wider Interest. The Potential Of A Big Financial Return For Innovation Unleashes A Broad Set Of Talented People In Pursuit Of Many Different Discoveries. This System, Driven By Self-interest, Is Responsible For The Incredible Innovations That Have Improved So Many Lives.

I Do Normal Kind Of Contributions, Particularly For People Who Are Going Over To Africa And Help Highlighting Global Health, And That's Tended To Be Pretty Bipartisan In Nature Because Of The Coalition There Exists Fortunately Around These Global Health Issues. But I Don't Think My Backing, Putting A Lot Of Money Into Political Contributions Is A Way I'm Going To Try And Help Improve The World.

If You're A Guest [at My $113 Million House], You'll Be Able To Call Up On Screens Throughout The House Almost Any Image You Like - Presidential Portraits, Reproductions Of High Renaissance Paintings, Pictures Of Sunsets, Airplanes, Skiers In The Andes, A Rare French Stamp, The Beatles In 1965.

I'm Not An Educator ... I'm A Learner.

If Geek Means You're Willing To Study Things, And If You Think Science And Engineering Matter, I Plead Guilty. If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

But The Improvements Will Happen Faster And Last Longer If We Can Channel Market Forces, Including Innovation That's Tailored To The Needs Of The Poorest, To Complement What Governments And Nonprofits Do. We Need A System That Draws In Innovators And Businesses In A Far Better Way Than We Do Today.

Capitalism Has Shortfalls. It Doesn't Necessarily Take Care Of The Poor, And It Underfunds Innovation, So We Have To Offset That.

There Were A Lot Of Missteps In The Early Days, But Because We Got In Early We Got To Make More Mistakes Than Other People.

We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

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

The Vision Is That People Should Have The Ultimate In Convenience. Being Able To Get The Things They Care About On The Appropriate Device.

I'm Going To Save My Public Voice Largely For The Issues Where I Have Some Depth.

Test Scores Aren't Perfect, But Having A Test Score For Math Or Reading Or Other Things That We Can Objectively Measure Is A Meaningful Component That Makes A Lot Of Sense.

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

Dos Is Ugly And Interferes With Users' Experience.

User Experience

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.

At Every Juncture, Advanced Tools Have Been The Key To A New Wave Of Applications, And Each Wave Of Applications Has Been Key To Driving Computing To The Next Level.

Now Everyone Takes It For Granted That You Can Look Up Movie Reviews, Track Locations, And Order Stuff Online. I Wish There Was A Way We Could Take It Away From People For A Day So They Could Remember What It Was Like Without It.

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

The Close Relationships We Form Between Researchers And Product Groups Have Already Shown We Can Move The Great Ideas As They Come Along, Without A Schedule, Into The Products.

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 All Have The Chance To Create A World Where Extreme Poverty Is The Exception Rather Than The Rule.

Newspaper Readership Is Still Growing In India.

For Africa To Move Forward, You've Really Got To Get Rid Of Malaria.

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.

At The End Of The Day, Natural-gas Peakers Sit Back There And Get Financed So That The Midwest Corridor Can Have A Huge [period] Of Four To Five Days Of No Wind. The Peakers Are Running Big Time To Make That Up, Because That Is The Swing Piece That Can Always Be Turned On.

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.

Now We've Got That [children's Death Rate] Down To About 5 Percent, So We've More Than Cut It In Half, And That's Because We're Getting Vaccines Out, Economic Improvement Also Helps There, But The Vaccines Are Why We've Seen An Acceleration In Getting That Down.

Today, The Issue Isn’t Quantity Of Food As Much As It Is Quality-whether Kids Are Getting Enough Protein And Other Nutrients To Fully Develop.

There's A True Schizophrenia Where If You Say To Voters, You Know, Do You Think The Federal Government Spends Too Much Money And They Should Spend Less, They Say Yeah, Absolutely. Then You Name Specific Things, Like Pell Grants For Students And They Say, No, Not That. How 'bout Nih, Medical Research Funding? Nah, You Really Shouldn't Cut That. And Pretty Soon You've Proved That What The American Public Is Against Is Arithmetic.

We'll Have Infinite Bandwidth In A Decade's Time.

This Is Something We're Very Committed To, It's Something That I Think People Are Underestimating Right Now As They've Seen Some Of The Dot-com Promises Not Come Through. I Think They're Missing The Fact That The Basic Technology Is Moving Forward, The New Platforms Are Here And This Vision Of The Digital Decade Will Be A Reality.

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?

People Think About This Idea That There's 122 Million Kids That Are Alive That Would Not Be If That Fatality Rate Had Stayed At The 1990 Level, That's 122 Million Families.

Some Very Poor Countries Run Great Vaccination Systems, And Some Richer Ones Run Terrible Programs.

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.

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

As You Get To The End Of The Project You Want To Run All The Tests Cases Against One Version And Make Sure That You Know That That Version Passed Everything. And So As You Get Late In The Project You Get A Little More Conservative About Making Radical Changes To The Software.

The Future Of Advertising Is The Internet.

Innovation Is Often The Hidden Thing, Because We Can't Put Numbers To It. And Yet It's The Thing That Defines The Way We Live, The Things We'd Like To Have For Everyone Whether It's Health Or Education.

As I Look Forward, I'm Very Optimistic About The Things I See Ahead.

To Be Born Poor Is Not Our Fault, But To Die Poor Is Crime

Often You Just Have To Rely On Your Intuition.

There Won't Be Anything We Won't Say To People To Try And Convince Them That Our Way Is The Way To Go.

If You Take From The Most Wealthy And Give To The Least Wealthy, It's Good. It Tries To Balance Out.

According To Ethiopian Custom, Parents Wait To Name A Baby Because Children Often Die In The First Weeks Of Life.

Headlines, In A Way, Are What Mislead You Because Bad News Is A Headline, And Gradual Improvement Is Not.

Like Many Others, I Have Deep Misgivings About The State Of Education In The United States. Too Many Of Our Students Fail To Graduate From High School With The Basic Skills They Will Need To Succeed In The 21st Century Economy, Much Less Prepared For The Rigors Of College And Career. Although Our Top Universities Continue To Rank Among The Best In The World, Too Few American Students Are Pursuing Degrees In Science And Technology. Compounding This Problem Is Our Failure To Provide Sufficient Training For Those Already In The Workforce.

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.

Our Work In Global Health Is About Things Like Cutting Childhood Deaths, And Every Year We Continue To Make Progress There.

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

Treatment Without Prevention Is Simply Unsustainable.

The Ability Of A Successful Company To Add Functionality To Its Product Has Long Been Upheld.

It Is Hard To Smash A Computer When You're Laughing.

Positive Thinking

We Need To Start Thinking About The Future Of Food If We Are Going To Feed 9 Billion People In A Way That Does Not Destroy Our Environment.

Getting Ready For A Global Pandemic Is Every Bit As Important As Nuclear Deterrence And Avoiding A Climate Catastrophe.

Government Investment Unlocks A Huge Amount Of Private Sector Activity, But The Basic Research That We Put Into It Work That Led To The Internet And Lots Of Great Companies And Jobs, The Basic Work We Put Into The Health Care Sector, Where It's Over $30 Billion A Year In R&d That Led The Biotech And Pharma Jobs. And It Creates Jobs And It Creates New Technologies That Will Be Productized. But The Government Has To Prime The Pump Here. The Basic Ideas, As In Those Other Industries, Start With Government Investment.

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.

People Are Using Windows Pcs More Than They Watch Tv Now.

In Order For The United States To Do The Right Things For The Long Term, It Appears To Be Helpful For Us To Have The Prospect Of Humiliation. Sputnik Helped Us Fund Good Science - Really Good Science: The Semiconductor Came Out Of It.

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.

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

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.

Thinking About Impact On Children Meant Adding To The Agenda, Both The R&d Agenda And The Delivery Agenda, But It's Amazing News, Even In The Scale Of Other Tragedies.

Microsoft Is Involved In Setting Some Fairly Key Standards And People Are Afraid Of It Because They Think, Geez, They Are Quite Capable. It's Daunting, I Suppose.

Information Technology And Business Are Becoming Inextricably Interwoven. I Don't Think Anybody Can Talk Meaningfully About One Without The Talking About The Other.

In Energy, You Have To Plan And Do Research Way In Advance, Sometimes Decades In Advance To Get A New System That's Safer, Doesn't Require Us To Go Around The World To Get All Our Oil.

To Win Big, You Sometimes Have To Take Big Risks.

There's Life And Death In Every Email.

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.

I Actually Thought That It Would Be A Little Confusing During The Same Period Of Your Life To Be In One Meeting When You're Trying To Make Money, And Then Go To Another Meeting Where You're Giving It Away. I Mean Is It Gonna Erode Your Ability, You Know, To Make Money? Are You Gonna Somehow Get Confused About What You're Trying To Do?

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.

Take Our 20 Best People Away, And I Will Tell You That Microsoft Will Become An Unimportant Company

The Media Covers What’s New – And Millions Of People Dying Is Nothing New. So It Stays In The Background, Where It’s Easier To Ignore. But Even When We Do See It Or Read About It, It’s Difficult To Keep Our Eyes On The Problem. It’s Hard To Look At Suffering If The Situation Is So Complex That We Don’t Know How To Help. And So We Look Away.

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.

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.

This Antitrust Thing Will Blow Over.

People Who Feel The World Is Tilted Against Them Will Spawn The Kind Of Hatred That Is Very Dangerous For All Of Us. I Think It's A Healthy Sign That There Are Demonstrators In The Streets. They Are Raising The Question Of 'is The Rich World Giving Back Enough?'

Measuring Programming Progress By Lines Of Code Is Like Measuring Aircraft Building Progress By Weight.

Death Is Something We Really Understand Extremely Well.

If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

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.

I Am Results-oriented.

Bioterrorism Is Like Earthquakes, You Should Think In Order Of Magnitudes. If You Can Kill 10 People That's A One, 100 People That's A Two... Bioterrorism Is The Thing That Can Give You Not Just Sixes, But Sevens, Eights And Nines.

We're Still Missing About A Dozen Vaccines That Will Make A Huge Difference. For Adults, We've Got Hiv And Tb Are Still Huge; For Kids Malaria Is Still Killing A Half Million Kids A Year Out Of That 6 Million. We Probably Need Some Vaccines, But We Need A Little More Data To Make Sure We're Getting The Vaccines That Will Save The Most Lives.

Whenever You Have Multiple Devices Including Multiple Pcs That You Want To Share Information With, It's Always Been A Bit Complicated.

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

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.

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

Programs Today Get Very Fat; The Enhancements Tend To Slow The Program Down Because People Put In Special Checks. When They Want To Add Some Feature, They’ll Just Stick In These Checks Without Thinking About How They Might Slow The Thing Down.

People Are Always Coming Up To Me And Saying, 'i Heard Your Dad's Speech, And It's Really Great.' And They'll Mention Some Place I Didn't Even Know My Dad Was Going To.

That It's A Worldwide Thing That Families Are Better Off.

I Definitely Think Leaving Kids Massive Amounts Of Money Is Not A Favor To Them.

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.

A Lot Of The Things That Will Really Improve The World Fortunately Aren't Dependent On Washington Doing Something Different.

Bitcoin Is A Technological Tour De Force

If You Want To Build A Great Company, Get The Hell Out Of Silicon Valley.

As You Improve Health In A Society, Population Growth Goes Down. You Know, I Thought It Was... Before I Learned About It, I Thought It Was Paradoxical.

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.

(on Being The World's Richest Man) I Wish I Wasn't ... There's Nothing Good That Comes Out Of That. You Get More Visibility As A Result Of It.

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.

Of My Mental Cycles, I Devote Maybe 10 Percent To Business Thinking. Business Isn't That Complicated. I Wouldn't Want To Put It On My Business Card.

Vaccines Are A Miracle; They're Fantastic. Anything That Makes People Hesitate To Give Their Children These Vaccines According To The Recommended Schedule Creates Risk. Risk For The Children Who Don't Get Vaccinated And Risk For Children, Some Of Whom Don't Have An Immune System, So They're Benefiting From The Fact That The Community Protection Means The Disease Doesn't Get To Them.

For A Highly Motivated Learner, It's Not Like Knowledge Is Secret And Somehow The Internet Made It Not Secret. It Just Made Knowledge Easy To Find. If You're A Motivated Enough Learner, Books Are Pretty Good.

If People Want Capital Gains Taxed More Like The Highest Rate On Income, That's A Good Discussion. Maybe That's The Way To Help Close The Deficit.

There Are Gmo Skeptics More In Europe Maybe Than In Other Places, But Not Exclusively.

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.

Our Modern Lifestyle Is Not A Political Creation. Before 1700, Everybody Was Poor As Hell. Life Was Short And Brutish. It Wasn't Because We Didn't Have Good Politicians; We Had Some Really Good Politicians. But Then We Started Inventing - Electricity, Steam Engines, Microprocessors, Understanding Genetics And Medicine And Things Like That. Yes, Stability And Education Are Important - I'm Not Taking Anything Away From That - But Innovation Is The Real Driver Of Progress.

You Can Be A Business Thinker.

I Believe Innovation Is The Most Powerful Force For Change In The World. People Who Are Pessimistic About The Future Tend To Extrapolate From The Present In A Straight Line. But Innovation Fundamentally Shifts The Trajectory Of Development.

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.

Make It Just Like A Mac.

The More You Learn, The More You Have A Framework That The Knowledge Fits Into.

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

Learning From Mistakes And Constantly Improving Products Is A Key In All Successful Companies.

It's Hard To Improve Public Education - That's Clear.

Public Education

I Like The Idea Of Putting Your Christmas Wish List Up And Letting People Share It.

Christmas Wishes

My Success, Part Of It Certainly, Is That I Have Focused In On A Few Things.

Focus In Business

The Information Society Should Serve All Of Its Citizens, Not Only The Technically Sophisticated And Economically Privileged.

If I Will Start All Over Again I Would Chose Network Marketing.

Network Marketing

The Trouble With Energy Farming Is That The Energy Isn't Always Where You Want To Use It, And It Isn't Always When You Want To Use It.

Everything On The Internet Is Real God Damn It!

Nobody Has A Guaranteed Position In Computer Technologies Business. We've Done Some Good Work, But All Of These Products Become Obsolete So Fast And The Structure Of The Business As It Broadens Out Is Going To Be So Different.

Whenever There Is Hard Work To Be Done, I Assign It To The Laziest Man As He Is Sure To Find An Easy Way Of Doing It. Be Lazy, Think Crazy.

Spam Is Taking E-mail, Which Is A Wonderful Tool, And Exploiting The Idea That It's Very Inexpensive To Send Mail.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Reading.

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.

It's The Knowledge Derived From Information That Gives You A Competitive Edge.

We're At The Point Now Where The Challenge Isn't How To Communicate Effectively With E-mail; It's Ensuring That You Spend Your Time On The E-mail That Matters Most.

You Have The Refugee Crisis Triggered By Syria. That's Got A Lot Of Costs Associated With It. Domestically, Budgets Are Incredibly Tight Because The Economy's Not Generating The Growth That Makes For Easy Trade-offs.

Exposure To The Reproductions [of Corbis-owned Fine Art Photographs] Is Likely To Increase Rather Than Diminish Reverence For The Real Art And Encourage More People To Get Out To Museums And Galleries.

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.

The First Five Years Have So Much To Do With How The Next 80 Turn Out.

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

The Tablet Is Not Mainstream. Reading Off The Screen Is Not Mainstream.

I'm Serious When I Do My Work. I'm Not Serious When I'm Home With My Kids.

Part Of The Magic Of Economic Growth Is How You Educate People, And The Leading Economies Have To Stay In Front Of That. From An Economic Point Of View, It Affects Competitiveness And Creates Jobs. Or From A Social Justice Point Of View, You Can Take Someone In The Bottom Tier Of Income And Let Him Compete To Be A Doctor Or Lawyer. The Education System Is The Only Reason The Dream Of Equal Opportunity Has A Chance Of Being Delivered - And We're Not Running A Good Education System.

There Is Competition, .. Can Any Microsoft Endure Future Competition Without Innovation? The Answer Is No. We've Got To Keep Changing.

Anything That Someone's Interested In Should Be Very, Very Easy To Call Up Onto The Screen. And In Fact The Computer Over Time Will See What You're Interested In And Make That Immediately Available Without Your Having To Be Give Any Commands At All.

I Don't Think There Is Any Philosophy That Suggests Having Polio Is A Good Thing.

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.

We Were Young, But We Had Good Advice And Good Ideas And Lots Of Enthusiasm.

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."

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.

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.

I Feel Pretty Stupid That I Don't Know Any Foreign Languages. I Wish I Knew French Or Arabic Or Chinese.

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.

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?

Software Will Get To Be Somewhat More Mature, Ah, But It Will Never Be As Predictable As Most Areas Of Engineering.

I Have This Very Positive View Of The World Getting Better And Better. The List Of Things That Could Be Huge Setbacks Is Not Very Long: A Nuclear War, Climate Change And Epidemics.

Humanity’s Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries – But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

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.

Taking A Look Back, One Big Reqret Is, I Left Harvard With No Real Awareness Of The Awful Inequities In The World. The Appalling Disparities Of Health And Wealth And Opportunity That Condemned Millions Of People To The Lives Of Despair. I Learned A Lot Here At Harvard About New Ideas And Economics, And Politics. I Got Great Exposure To The Advances Being Made In The Sciences. But Humanities Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries, But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

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

The Concept Of This So-called "terrapower Reactor" Is That You, In The Same Reactor, You Both Burn And Breed. So, Instead Of Making Plutonium And Then Extracting It, We Take Uranium - The 99.3 Percent That You Normally Don't Do Anything With - We Convert That, And We Burn It.

Me And My Dad Are The Biggest Promoters Of An Estate Tax In The Us. It's Not A Popular Position.

When I Was Young I Liked Taking Tests. I Happened To Be Good At It. Certain Subjects Came Easily, Like Math. All The Science Stuff. I Would Just Read The Textbooks In The First Few Days Of Class.

It’s Been Proven That Of All The Interventions To Reduce Poverty, Improving Agricultural Productivity Is The Best.

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.

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.

We're Only At The Beginning Of What We Have To Do Here.

Software Was Changing So Fast, So Unbelievable, That That Got Very Quick Adoption.

Embrace Bad News To Learn Where You Need The Most Improvement.

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.

I'm Not A Macroeconomics Person.

I Never Took A Day Off In My Twenties. Not One.

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 Are Not Even Close To Finishing The Basic Dream Of What The Pc Can Be.

The World Won't Care About Your Self-esteem. The World Will Expect You To Accomplish Something Before You Feel Good About Yourself.

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

There Are More People Dying Of Malaria Than Any Specific Cancer.

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.

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.

When I Was Trying To Figure Out Why Lives Have Improved So Much In The Last 300 Years, Where We've Gone From A Third Of Kids Dying Before 5 To - By 1990 It Was Down To 10% - Now It's Down To 5%. And Saying Why, Over All History, There Were Smart People, But That Number Didn't Change. Average Life Span Didn't Change. What's Magical About What's Been Deemed The Industrial Revolution? It's Really Energy Intensity.

I Don't Think Culture Is Something You Can Describe.

This Social-networking Thing Takes You To Crazy Places.

If You're Taking Care Of Your Family And Society And Are Comfortable You Can Start To Think About Helping Those Most In Need Globally. That's How We Became Engaged In Those Things.

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

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

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.

My Wife Thinks She's Better Than Me At Puzzles. I Haven't Given In On That One Yet.

American Dependence On Oil Has Only Gone Up As We've Gone Through Various Crises And Not Invested In R&d.

We're Changing The World With Technology.

Changing The World

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

The Challenge Here Is To Design A System Where Market Incentives, Including Profits And Recognition, Drive Those Principles To Do More For The Poor. I Like To Call This Idea Creative Capitalism, An Approach Where Governments, Businesses, And Nonprofits Work Together To Stretch The Reach Of Market Forces So That More People Can Make A Profit, Or Gain Recognition, Doing Work That Eases The World's Inequities.

If You're Smart, You Often Want A Feedback Loop So You Know If What You've Done Is... Is Right.

Analytical Software Enables You To Shift Human Resources From Rote Data Collection To Value-added Customer Service And Support Where The Human Touch Makes A Profound Difference.

Data Collection

Unemployment Rates Among Americans Who Never Went To College Are About Double That Of Those Who Have A Postsecondary Education.

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.

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.

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Julius Charles Hare

Stanley Baldwin

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