Bill Gates Quotes & Sayings

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

We will never make a 32-bit operating system. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people. — Bill Gates

It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge. — Bill Gates

We were young, but we had good advice and good ideas and lots of enthusiasm. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom. — Bill Gates

The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right. — Bill Gates

With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country. — Bill Gates

'I don't know' has become 'I don't know yet'. — Bill Gates

This antitrust thing will blow over. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

We believe the world changes when the boldest thinking is directed at the toughest problems — Bill Gates

Some people read off of their Palms and Pocket PCs, but the real immersible reading experience takes a full-screen device. — Bill Gates

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder. — Bill Gates

Perhaps I should be flattered that somebody imagines the name is worth so much, especially since my parents gave me the same name 42 years ago for free. — Bill Gates

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources. — Bill Gates

The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less. — Bill Gates

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream. — Bill Gates

Powerful women are either sexually voracious rulers like Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, or treacherous bitches like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy — Bill Gates

My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier. — Bill Gates

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. — Bill Gates

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can't solve extreme poverty and disease isn't just mistaken. It is harmful. That's why in this year's letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Most poor people live in the poorest countries. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria. — Bill Gates

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important. — Bill Gates

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do. — Bill Gates

Bitcoin is a technological tour de force — Bill Gates

Be nice to nerds, they'll probably be your boss one day. — Bill Gates

The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids. — Bill Gates

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster. — Bill Gates

Our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium - the 99.3 percent that's cheap as heck, and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah, Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years. You're taking that and you are converting it to plutonium (humorously under his breath) - and then you're burning that. — Bill Gates

Death is something we really understand extremely well. — Bill Gates

(Talking about his first computer) Like all kids we not only fooled around with our toys, we changed them. If you've ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules, such as "Red cars can jump all others," then you know that this impulse to make a toy do more is at the heart of innovative childhood play. It is also the essence of creativity. — Bill Gates

Make it just like a Mac. — Bill Gates

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so. — Bill Gates

If success corrupts, I'm probably pretty corrupted by now. — Bill Gates

Computers and games don't waste time - people do. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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

The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly' ... Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover. — Bill Gates

The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work. — Bill Gates

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten. — Bill Gates

The future of advertising is the Internet. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve. — Bill Gates

People cannot become truly knowledgeable without being excellent readers. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong. — Bill Gates

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

I don't generally read a lot of fiction. — Bill Gates

The Ebola epidemic can serve as an early warning wake-up call to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic. — Bill Gates

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services. — Bill Gates

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree. — Bill Gates

There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things. — Bill Gates

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy. — Bill Gates

3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we're getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we've ever had before. — Bill Gates

I don't like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it. — Bill Gates

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. — Bill Gates

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive. — Bill Gates

You can be a business thinker. — Bill Gates

About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are 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. — Bill Gates

Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors. — Bill Gates

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf. — Bill Gates

Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection. — Bill Gates

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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

The need to communicate effectively with your customers will come up again and again. — Bill Gates

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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

You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. — Bill Gates

I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English. — Bill Gates

My wife thinks she's better than me at puzzles. I haven't given in on that one yet. — Bill Gates

If i will start all over again I would chose network marketing. — Bill Gates

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

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. — Bill Gates

I don't think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren't something I considered very important. — Bill Gates

When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. — Bill Gates

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough. — Bill Gates

India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid. — Bill Gates

Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination. — Bill Gates

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. — Bill Gates

To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates