Bill Gates On Quotes & Sayings

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Good developers like seeing their products sell in large quantities. They enjoy the competition of doing a better job than the other company, especially if the other company has more people on the project and they're entrenched and people are saying that we don't have a chance of getting in there and ... and doing well. — Bill Gates

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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? — Bill Gates

There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business — Bill Gates

There are many people who think we should have zero tax on capital gains, interest and dividends for everybody, as - the very, very wealthy. But recognize that means that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would pay no income tax at all. And some people say, 'Well, that's a good thing for growth of the economy.' — Mitt Romney

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. — Bill Gates

Depending on where you live, cooking, sex and pooping are either 3 of life's pleasures or what kills you — Bill Gates

If I had one dollar left, I'd spend it on PR — 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

Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology. — Bill Gates

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever. — Bill Gates

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it's a good thing they'll be reading a newspaper on a screen. — Bill Gates

So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side. — Bill Gates

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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." — Bill Gates

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam. — Bill Gates

On his Giving Pledge philanthropy: The way I got the message out was to get a copy of FORBES, look down that 400 list and start making phone calls! Bill and Melinda [Gates] did the same thing. So keep publishing
the list so I can milk it. — Warren Buffett

(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. — Bill Gates

By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges. — Bill Gates

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren't dependent on Washington doing something different. — 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

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. — Bill Gates

The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

There are two kinds of warriors:
those on the battlefield,
and those in the boardroom;
both are out to win.
But the age of King Alexander has gone,
and the age of Bill Gates has come. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible. — Bill Gates

The poor can't wait. Philanthropists needed to carry on being generous. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card. — Bill Gates

Polio's pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it's just there as a gift for the rest of time. — 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

Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it. — Bill Gates

I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities ... on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but your humanity. — Bill Gates

If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I'd spend it on PR! — Bill Gates

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business. — Bill Gates

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable. — Bill Gates

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life. — Bill Gates

When you have a fortune that is almost hard to imagine, the best thing is not to pass that on to one's children. That distorts their life situation. — Bill Gates

Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end. — Bill Gates

Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not. One reason that people confuse the two concepts is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists debate to what degree). Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts. In other words, you can be a shy extrovert, like Barbra Streisand, who has a larger-than-life personality and paralyzing stage fright; or a non-shy introvert, like Bill Gates, who by all accounts keeps to himself but is unfazed by the opinions of others. — Susan Cain

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

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. — Bill Gates

If we have optimism without empathy then it doesn't matter how much we master the secrets of science. We're not really solving problems, we're just working on puzzles. — Bill Gates

Measles will always show you if someone isn't doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles. — Bill Gates

Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth." — Bill Gates

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

The first big effects will be farmers that live on the edge. Today's weather, they barely get by. Their kids, a high percentage are malnourished, and so if you impose more variable weather and more heat, you're getting more floods, more droughts, and during the germination time, the high heat, most crops ... do poorly when there's more heat. — Bill Gates

Everything on the internet is real god damn it! — Bill Gates

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering. — Bill Gates

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

Often you have to rely on intuition. — Bill Gates

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

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited ... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while. — Bill Gates

I am not a huge gamer. My son knows a LOT more than I do about what is cool on Xbox. I played Halo but the sports games that the whole family can use are the things I use the most. I threw the javelin very very far! — Bill Gates

Often you just have to rely on your intuition. — Bill Gates

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes. — Bill Gates

It's been said that Bill Gates has come up with something that'll be released in December that's gonna put a lid on counterfeiting. If that's a fact then it's really interesting to own your own product - with all the potential methods of downloading. — Merle Haggard

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. — Bill Gates

The world could not long ignore a holy church. The church is not despised because it is holy: it is despised because it is not holy enough. There is not enough difference between the people inside the church and those outside to be impressive. A church in which saints were as common as now they are rare would convict the world, if only by contrast. Sanctity cannot be ignored. Even a little bit is potent. So far from the gates of hell prevailing against it, it hammers on their triple steel. — Bill Vaughan

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. — Bill Gates

If I hadn't given my money away, I'd have had more than anyone else on the planet. — Bill Gates

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

So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic. — Bill Gates

Vaccination is one of the easiest things on the way to development. It's much easier than roads and a great education system. It's very basic. It's one of the first things you want to get right. — Bill Gates

Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building. — Bill Gates

It is really gratifying, for example, to visit India now and see that because they've had good educational institutions, and they've had a focus on it, there are more and more people in India participating in the world economy. — Bill Gates

Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a "microprocessor." Moore's Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The — Walter Isaacson

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

American dependence on oil has only gone up as we've gone through various crises and not invested in R&D. — Bill Gates

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful! — Bill Gates

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance ... you thrive on that. — 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

My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy. — Bill Gates

Unfortunately, most of my secular friends would agree with Bill Gates, who considers religion a waste of time: "There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning," he told an interviewer. They view the church not as a change agent that can affect all of society but as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves. — Philip Yancey

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft's Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called "two-pizza teams." Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people - small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon's biggest problems. — Brad Stone

If you rely too much on the people in other countries and other companies, in a sense that's your brain and you are outsourcing your brain. — Bill Gates

I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on [the] HIV vaccine. There's leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who've got a certain approach they take that are pretty amazing. There [are] product innovators like Steve Jobs was, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job. — Bill Gates

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning. — Bill Gates

I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number. — Bill Gates

Oprah is rich; Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out of a ... window and slit his throat on the way down saying, 'I can't even put gas in my plane!' — Chris Rock

Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America's poor have not shared in the productivity gains spawned by Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates did not take their pie away; he did not stand in the way of their success or benefit from their misfortunes. — Charles Wheelan

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. — Bill Gates

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. — Bill Gates

Google's done a super good job on search; Apple's done a great job on the IPod. — 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

An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else. — Bill Gates