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We Need To Look At Less Obvious Paths, Things Like The Wind In The Jet Stream, Which Is Very High Up. The Material Science Of What Type Of Kite String You Would Need To Connect Up To That. That's Still At The Basic Research Level.

-Bill Gates

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Bill Gates

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We Need To Look At Less Obvious Paths, Things Like The Wind In The Jet Stream, Which Is Very High Up. The Material Science Of What Type Of Kite String You Would Need To Connect Up To That. That's Still At The Basic Research Level.

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The Poor Can't Wait. Philanthropists Needed To Carry On Being Generous.

The Computer Was Born To Solve Problems That Did Not Exist Before.

If You're Using First-class Land For Biofuels, Then You're Competing With The Growing Of Food. And So You're Actually Spiking Food Prices By Moving Energy Production Into Agriculture.

I Think It Makes Sense To Believe In God, But Exactly What Decision In Your Life You Make Differently Because Of It, I Don't Know.

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

As We Have Taken Diarrhea And Pneumonia Down, Even Malaria Down Quite A Bit, The Portion Of The Days That Are Very Early In That 5 Years - The First Month, The First Day - It's About Half Now. Yet That's The Part We Understand The Least.

India Has Over 20 Percent Of The Kids Born In The World. And They Move Around A Lot.

Treatment Without Prevention Is Simply Unsustainable.

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.

Does The E-mail Say It's About 'enlargement' - That Might Be Spam.

I Could Name About A Dozen Paths, And You'd Like To Have A Whole Bunch Of Research On All Those Paths, And Then, Eventually, At Least Four To Five Companies With Really Significant Financing Try And Get To Big Scale, Going Down And Really Trying To Prove It Out.

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.

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.

Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point.

The Billion People Who Wake Up Every Day Trying To Figure Out If They Have Enough Food To Eat Won't Be At Davos.

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.

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

Middle-income Countries Are The Biggest Users Of Gmos. Places Like Brazil.

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.

Finally, Assuming That Many Of Those Are Fulfilled, Which Won't Be Easy In Tight Budget Times, We're Taking The Supply Side At The Basic Research Level, Because That's Where Government Is Absolutely Fundamental.

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.

Dos Is Ugly And Interferes With Users' Experience.

User Experience

I'm Certainly Well Taken Care Of In Terms Of Food And Clothes ... Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point. Its Utility Is Entirely In Building An Organization And Getting The Resources Out To The Poorest In The World.

The Key Thing You Can Do To Reduce Population Growth Is Actually Improve Health.

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.

Thanks To Quality Education, Israel Is One Of The Most Advanced Countries In The World .. Israel Is Advancing In High-tech Even More Than Other Developed Countries.

There Are A Variety Of Techniques For Breaking Software Down Into Pieces And Making Software Development More Efficient. Many Of These Techniques Have Been Sort Of... And Everybody Got Excited About But Very Little Benefit Was Actually Derived Once The Thing Was Put Into Practice.

Google's Done A Super Good Job On Search; Apple's Done A Great Job On The Ipod.

The World Today Has 6.8 Billion People...that's Headed Up To About 9 Billion. If We Do A Really Great Job On Vaccines, Health Care, Reproductive Health Services, We Could Lower That By Perhaps 10 To 15 Percent.

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.

We All Need People Who Will Give Us Feedback. That's How We Improve.

When You Have Money In Hand,only You Forget Who Are You .but When You Do Not Have Any Money In Your Hand,the Whole World Forget Who You Are.it's Life.

(in Response To Java) Anybody Who Thinks A Little 9,000-line Program That's Distributed Free And Can Be Cloned By Anyone Is Going To Affect Anything We Do At Microsoft Has His Head Screwed On Wrong.

The Typical Project Design Time For A Large Company Like Ibm - And They Keep Track Of This - Is A Little Over Four Years.

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

We're Focused On Providing Innovations In Software, Driving The Continuous Improvement For A Much Better Experience, And There's A Lot Going On Here That Speaks To This Decade And What's Going To Happen In This Decade. We Can Kind Of Sum It Up In Terms Of Saying, "yes, You Can."

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.

People In Business Understand Paying Money To Be More Efficient. You Can Bootstrap Markets Where The Devices Are Too Expensive At First Because These Are So Valuable To Some People.

Drones Overall Will Be More Impactful Than I Think People Recognize In Positive Ways To Help Society.

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 Green Revolution Focused On The Big Three - Maize, Rice And Wheat - And The Green Revolution Did Not Adapt The Big Three To African Conditions, Other Than South Africa, As Much As They Should Have.

My Innovation Message, Specifically Including Energy, Happened To Be The Same Week That On Monday And Tuesday I Announced The Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then On That Tuesday Afternoon, In December, Was When I Sat Down With Him. I Explained The Us Has Great Science Here, This Is Where The Market For These Things Is Going To Be. It Connects To Less Pollution, It Connects To U.s. Jobs, It Connects To Security, Not Needing The Energy Coming From Far Away.

The United States Has A Huge Budget Deficit So Taxes Are Going To Have To Go Up And I Certainly Agree They Should Go Up More On The Rich Than Everyone Else. That - That's Just Justice.

The Most Important Work I Got A Chance To Be Involved In, No Matter What I Do, Is The Personal Computer... I Even Knew Not To Get Married Until Later Because I Was So Obsessed With It. That's My Life's Work.

The Most Important People Is To Pick People Who Like To Write Software And Who Are Good At... Good Developers Like Working With Each Other. And They... They Reinforce Each Other's Skills.

If You Count E-mail, I'm On The Internet All Day, Every Day.

I Think Ebola Is A Great Example Of Where The World Really Needs To Come Together. The Three Countries Where This Outbreak Took Place Have Had A Lot Of Civil War, Very Weak Health Systems. And So, It Did Take A While For People To Understand ....that Eventually What We Saw Was A Very Unique Ebola Epidemic. I Think It Is Quite Impressive What's Being Pulled Together, And I Think We Will Be Able To Get This Under Control.

Legacy Is A Stupid Thing! I Don't Want A Legacy.

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

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 Want To Make Clear That We Respect The Role Of Government In Our Legal Andeconomic System.

I Think Of Myself As A Global Citizen.

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

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

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.

The Idea That You Encourage Companies To Take Their Innovative Thinkers And Think About The Most Needy - Even Beyond The Market Opportunities - That's Something That Appropriately Ought To Be Done.

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

It's Energy Intensification, Where We Essentially Have, Through Our Light Bulbs And Cars, The Manpower Of [hundreds Of] People Working On Our Behalf, Helping Our Food Being Created, Helping Our Materials Like Steel And Plastic And Wood And Paper Be Created. Our Lifestyles Are Incredibly Energy Intense.

You Need To Understand Things In Order To Invent Beyond Them.

The Machines Need To Get Faster. They Need To Get Cheaper.

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

There's No Such Thing As Going To A Soapbox And Saying, 'the Government's Corrupt,' And Not Having The Intelligence Service See Your Face. In The Digital World, That Can Be Done.

Intelligence Services

No One Person Controls Microsoft. The Board And The Shareholders Decide Whether They Want To Have Me As Ceo.

If Somebody Is Considering Being Willing To Go Out And Work In The Field In Global Health, Those Are A Particular Class Of Heroes Because It's Hard To Work In Those Places. Our Foundation Gets So Many Of Our Learnings From People Who've Been Out There And Seen, "this Tool Is Not Going To Work There, There's More Of A Problem Here Than You Know." You Should Really Get Involved In That.

Everyone Needs A Coach. It Doesn't Matter Whether You're A Basketball Player, A Tennis Player, A Gymnast Or A Bridge Player.

Most People Overestimate What They Can Do In One Year And Underestimate What They Can Do In Ten Years.

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.

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.

I'm Going To Retain A Lot Of Microsoft's Stock.

When You Have A Product That Has Zero Sales, It Is Easy For People To Say Whatever They Want About It And Almost Fantasize About It.

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

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.

If We [the Usa] Don't Innovate In Education, It's Literally Going To Mean Less People Get To Go Have That Education At A Time When More People Are Going To Want It. We've Got To Put Courses Out On The Web, We've Got To Put Interactive Learning Out On The Web.

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.

It's Not Easy To Remember, But Ibm Was The Computer Industry When I Was Growing Up. You Loved 'em. You Hated 'em. You Knew What They Were Doing. They Had Set A Standard For Mainframes. They Also Set A Standard For Great Sales Focus And Heavy Product R & D.

In Some Ways, If You Make Mistakes With Your Own Money, You Don't Feel As Bad About It As If It Was Someone Else's.

Paul And I, We Never Thought That We Would Make Much Money Out Of The Thing. We Just Loved Writing Software.

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

Our Vision, Which Has Not Changed Since The Day The Company Was Founded.

Be Nice To Nerds, They'll Probably Be Your Boss One Day.

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.

Natural Epidemics Can Be Extremely Large. Intentionally Caused Epidemics, Bioterrorism, Would Be The Largest Of All.

The Obvious Mathematical Breakthrough Would Be Development Of An Easy Way To Factor Large Prime Numbers.

Well-spent Aid Money Is Saving Lives For A Few Thousand Dollars Per Life Saved.

Vaccines Are Extremely Well Tested; Their Safety Is Well Understood. The False Allegations About Vaccines Causing Autism Have Been Disproven. But There Are Still Echoes Out There Confusing People.

We're Changing The World With Technology.

Changing The World

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.

Creativity Allows People To Be Effective.

Even For The Very Best Programmers Ah, Sometimes You'll See Someone Else's Program Or Somebody Will Come Along And They'll Show You What Can Be Done In A Simpler Way.

When Making Choices, Or Setting Policies About The Economy, Education Or Medicine, Society Is Best Served By Electing People Who Are Particularly Hardworking, Intelligent And Interested In Long-term Thinking.

If Your Goal Is To Make The World A Better Place, One Thing You Can Do Is Pick A Specific Challenge That You Really Care About. Then, Learn As Much As You Can About It And Try To Volunteer Your Time To Help An Organization That Is Working In This Area. While You're Doing That, Look For Creative New Ways To Use Technology To Tackle Parts Of The Problem That You Come In Contact With.

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

Philanthropy, Although It's Tiny Compared To The Government, It's 2% Of The Us Economy, Which Is The Largest Percentage, Other Than The Middle East.

I Am Surprised That In Various Countries, Whether It's The U.k. Or The U.s., You See Isolationist Tendencies That Would Tend To Work Against The Co-operation, Whether It's Climate Change, Immigration, Innovation, Helping The Very Poorest. Those Are Things Where You Want To Think Across Country Boundaries And See A Win-win-type Solution.

Success Is A Lousy Teacher. It Makes You Think You Know What You're Doing.

My Tax Return In The United States Has To Be Kept On A Special Computer Because Their Normal Computers Can't Deal With The Numbers. So I Am Constantly Getting These Notices Telling Me I Haven't Paid Something When Really It Is Just On The Wrong Computer.

People Are Building The Software And So Having The Pieces Be Such That A Single Person Understands All The Tradeoffs And Everything That's Going On In A Piece Is Extremely Valuable. It Avoids Getting Into An Experimental Mode Where You're Just Trying Things Out. That Never Works.

Leaders Are Those Who Empower Others.

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?

Who In Their Right Mind Would Ever Need More Than 640k Of Ram!?

This Antitrust Thing Will Blow Over.

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 Believe In Innovation And That The Way You Get Innovation Is You Fund Research And You Learn The Basic Facts.

I Think There Will Be Pcs At Every Price Point.

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

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%.

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

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.

Almost Every Way We Make Electricity Today, Except For The Emerging Renewables And Nuclear, Puts Out Co2. And So, What We're Going To Have To Do At A Global Scale, Is Create A New System. And So, We Need Energy Miracles.

The Most Important Thing Was The Creation Of A... A Standard, Where Hundreds Of Companies Build Hardware That Can All Run The Same Software.

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.

Being Maniacal About Something Is Very Helpful.

The Most Amazing Philanthropists Are People Who Are Actually Making A Significant Sacrifice.

The Future Of Windows Is To Let The Computer See, Listen And Even Learn.

Maintaining A Consistent Platform Also Helps Improve Product Support - A Significant Problem In The Software Industry.

Effective Philanthropy Requires A Lot Of Time And Creativity - The Same Kind Of Focus And Skills That Building A Business Requires.

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

We Are Seeing Smarter Philanthropy, More Philanthropy, And That's True World Wide. So It's Kind Of A Movement That Has A Lot Of Accomplishments, Even Though As A Percentage Of The Economy, It's Still Only A Few Per Cent.

If Gm Had Kept Up With Technology Like The Computer Industry Has, We Would All Be Driving $25 Cars That Got 1,000 Mpg.

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

There Was A Magical Breakthrough When The Computer Became Cheap And We Could See That Everyone Could Afford A Computer.

When I Was Growing Up, My Parents Were Almost Involved In Various Volunteer Things. My Dad Was Head Of Planned Parenthood. And It Was Very Controversial To Be Involved With That.

The Us Spends More On Energy R&d Than All Other Countries Put Together, And I Personally Consider It Quite Inadequate.

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.

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.

The General Idea Of The Rich Helping The Poor, I Think, Is Important. That Your Sense Of Justice Says, Why Should Rich Kids - Who Barely Get These Diseases And Almost Never Die Of Them - Why Should They Get The Vaccines, When Poor Kids, Who Actually Do Die From These Diseases, Don't Get Those Things? It's An Unbelievable Inequity That There Isn't That Access.

Music, Even With These Dial-up Connections You Have To The Internet, Is Very Practical To Download.

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.

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.

You Can Go Overboard In How Quickly You Might Expect New Technologies To Transform People's Lives. But I Very Much Believe The Way Software Is Used, The Way Information Gets Distributed, Will Be Dramatically Different Within 10 Years. There Is Fire To Go With All This Smoke.

I Believe That If You Show People The Problems And You Show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act.

Only A Few Businesses Will Succeed By Having The Lowest Price, So Most Will Need A Strategy That Includes Customer Services.

You Always Overestimate What You Can Get Done In A Year And Underestimate What You Can Get Done In 10 Years.

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.

Playing Bridge Is A Pretty Old Fashioned Thing In A Way That I Really Like. I Was Watching My Daughter Ride Horses This Weekend And That Is Also A Bit Old Fashioned But Fun. I Do The Dishes Every Night - Other People Volunteer But I Like The Way I Do It.

I've For Some Reason Or Other... Never Met Donald Trump.

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

I Have A Particular Relationship With Vinod Khosla Because He's Got A Lot Of Very Interesting Science-based Energy Startups.

Very Interesting

If You Are Born Poor Its Not Your Mistake, But If You Die Poor Its Your Mistake.

I Believe That With Great Wealth Comes Great Responsibility, A Responsibility To Give Back To Society And A Responsibility To See That Those Resources Are Put To Work In The Best Possible Way To Help Those Most In Need.

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.

To Be A Good Professional Engineer, Always Start To Study Late For Exams Because It Teaches You How To Manage Time And Tackle Emergencies.

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.

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

In Business, The Idea Of Measuring What You Are Doing, Picking The Measurements That Count Like Customer Satisfaction And Performance... You Thrive On That.

Online Education Is Pretty Special For Two Reasons. One Is That You Can Get The Very Best Lecture In The World And Wherever You Are, Whenever You Want, You Can Connect To That Lecture. The Other Is This Interactivity, Where If You Know A Topic, You Can Kind Of Skip Over It. Or If You're Confused About It, [the Area] Where You're Confused Can Be Analyzed By Software.

Microsoft Went Into Orbit Because It Had A Booster Rocket Attached To It Called Ibm.

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

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.

In Most Of These Things Our Foundation Is A Co-funder, So I Can Say That A Polio Or An Hiv Vaccine, That I'm Putting Our Resources Behind It In A Very Big Way And The U.s. Government Would Be The Best Partner For Those Efforts.

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.

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

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.'

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.

I Hope Corporations Will Dedicate A Percentage Of Their Top Innovators' Time To Issues That Could Help People Left Out Of The Global Economy. This Kind Of Contribution Is Even More Powerful Than Giving Cash Or Offering Employees' Time Off To Volunteer. It Is A Focused Use Of What Your Company Does Best. It Is A Great Form Of Creative Capitalism, Because It Takes The Brainpower And Makes Life Better For The Richest, And Dedicates Some Of It To Improving The Lives Of Everyone Else.

...one Of The Most Inventive Forms Of Creative Capitalism Involves Someone We All Know Very Well. A Few Years Ago, I Was Sitting In A Bar Here In Davos With Bono. Late At Night, After A Few Drinks, He Was On Fire, Talking About How We Could Get A Percentage Of Each Purchase From Civic-minded Companies To Help Change The World. He Kept Calling People, Waking Them Up, And Handing Me The Phone To Show Me The Interest.

There Is No Doubt That As An Economy Grows In A Great Way Like India Has, That You Have To Step Back And Change Your Tax Systems, Because You Start To Get More Disparities Of Wealth.

I've Always Been Amazed By Da Vinci, Because He Worked Out Science On His Own. He Would Work By Drawing Things And Writing Down His Ideas. Of Course, He Designed All Sorts Of Flying Machines Way Before You Could Actually Build Something Like That.

A First-generation Fortune Is The Most Likely To Be Given Away, But Once A Fortune Is Inherited It's Less Likely That A Very High Percentage Will Go Back To Society.

It Is A High Bar To Say That It's More Fun Than Working On Software Because The Work At Microsoft That Both Melinda [gates] And I Did Was Thrilling. We Were Making Breakthroughs And Empowering People.

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.

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.

The Wright Brothers Created The Single Greatest Cultural Force Since The Invention Of Writing. The Airplane Became The First World Wide Web, Bringing People, Languages, Ideas, And Values Together.

Microsoft Is Not About Greed. It's About Innovation And Fairness.

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

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

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 Believe In Generous Aid Policies.

If You Really Could Take The Co2, When You Burn Hydrocarbons - Coal, For Example - If You Could Really Capture The Carbon And Sequester It - They Call It Ccs - If The Extra Capital Cost, Energy Cost, And Storage Costs Over Time Didn't Make It Super Expensive, Then That's Another Path That You Could Go Down.

Well Depending On The Government, You Either Work Through The Government, Which Is Ideal, Because Then You're Strengthening Their Capabilities, Or You Work Through The Non-governmental Organizations. It's Never Easy, And You Know, It's Just About The Very Basics Of Health. This Is Not Hospitals. This Is Just Primary Health Care [in Africa], The Most Simple Things, And Even So, Getting The Supplies Out, Getting The Trained Workers There.

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

A Company's Ability To Respond To An Unplanned Event, Good Or Bad Is A Prime Indicator Of Its Ability To Compete.

I Believe Technology Will Continue To Become More Affordable And More People Will Have The Chance To Use It. This Will Help More People Get Medical Care And A Good Education.

I Think There's Even A Chance That [r&d And Innovation Budgets] Might Be Increased [during Donald Trump Administration] And We Should Go And Make That Case To The Executive Branch, To The Congress.

Steve Jobs' Ability To Focus In On A Few Things That Count, Get People Who Get User Interface Right, And Market Things As Revolutionary Are Amazing Things.

I Mean, If We Said Right Now, There's Somebody In The Next Room Who's Dying, Let's All Go Save Their Life, You Know, Everybody Would Just Get Up Immediately And Go Get Involved In That.

You Don't Have To Own A Tv Network To Go Out And Do A Cool Show.

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.

I Try To Make Time For Reading Each Night. In Addition To The Usual Newspapers And Magazines, I Make It A Priority To Read At Least One Newsweekly From Cover To Cover. If I Were To Read What Intrigues Me- Say, The Science And Business Sections - Then I Would Finish The Magazine The Same Person I Was When I Started. So I Read It All.

I Think (the Internet) Is Contributing To Chinese Political Engagement..access To The Outside World Is Preventing More Censorship.

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.

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.

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.

Technology Is Just A Tool. In Terms Of Getting The Kids Working Together And Motivating Them, The Teacher Is The Most Important.

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.

We Weren't Trying To Just Go Public And Get Rich. There Was No Near-term Thing. It Always Was This Many-decades Thing Where There Were No Shortcuts And We'd Sort Of Put One Foot In Front Of The Other.

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

It Is Hard To Sell Congress And The American People On Foreign Aid. Is It Harder To Do That Than It Is To Sell Billionaires On The Idea That They Should Give All Their Money Away.

Depending On Where You Live, Cooking, Sex And Pooping Are Either 3 Of Life's Pleasures Or What Kills You

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

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

China And The U.s. Need Each Other Very Badly. Yes, We Should Argue About Some Things, But It's Not An 'us Versus Them,' It's An 'us And Them' Type Scenario.

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.

Sometimes We Do Get Taken By Surprise. For Example, When The Internet Came Along, We Had It As A Fifth Or Sixth Priority. It Wasn't Like Somebody Told Me About It And I Said, "i Don't Know How To Spell That." I Said, "yeah, I've Got That On My List, So I'm Okay." But There Came A Point When We Realized It Was Happening Faster And Was A Much Deeper Phenomenon Than Had Been Recognized In Our Strategy.

(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.

If You Give People Tools, And They Use Their Natural Abilities And Their Curiosity, They Will Develop Things In Ways That Will Surprise You Very Much Beyond What You Might Have Expected.

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

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.

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.

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