Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally. -Bill Gates
Software is a great combination of artistry and engineering. -Bill Gates
We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering. -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
I have a nice office. I have a nice house… So I’m not denying myself some great things. I just don’t happen to have expensive hobbies. -Bill Gates
I’m going to retain a lot of Microsoft’s stock. -Bill Gates
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things. -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
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
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now. -Bill Gates
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying. -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
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it. -Bill Gates
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
Africa is on the rise. -Bill Gates
There are 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure. -Bill Gates
Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings. -Bill Gates
Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to. -Bill Gates
When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil. -Bill Gates
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years. -Bill Gates
There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints. -Bill Gates
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing. -Bill Gates
What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‘Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.’ -Bill Gates
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids. -Bill Gates
Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible. -Bill Gates
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing. -Bill Gates
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts. -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
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. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems. -Bill Gates
We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past. -Bill Gates
The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say the treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name. -Bill Gates
I think there will be PCs at every price point. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it no secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. -Bill Gates
Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs. -Bill Gates
Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. -Bill Gates
In low-income countries, the main problems you have are infectious diseases. -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, it’s pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one and the same. -Bill Gates
The mainstream is always under attack. -Bill Gates
For Africa to move forward, you’ve really got to get rid of malaria. -Bill Gates
The best teacher is very interactive. -Bill Gates
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail. -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
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
The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done. -Bill Gates
I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English. -Bill Gates
In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive. -Bill Gates
You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well. -Bill Gates
Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it. -Bill Gates
I’m not a macroeconomics person. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet. -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
To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard. -Bill Gates
Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not. -Bill Gates
The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it’s very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk. -Bill Gates
I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of the university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in. -Bill Gates
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable. -Bill Gates
Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it. -Bill Gates
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
I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and checked the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs. -Bill Gates
The spread of online information isn’t just good for charities. It’s also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work. -Bill Gates
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education. -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 get more spam than anyone I know. -Bill Gates
With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And – there’s more – more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case. -Bill Gates
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB, and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand. -Bill Gates
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. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people. -Bill Gates
Teaching’s hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way. -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
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It’s more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted. -Bill Gates
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‘Does your teacher use class time well?’ and, ‘When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?’ -Bill Gates
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching. -Bill Gates
The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite. -Bill Gates
I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool. -Bill Gates
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.’ -Bill Gates
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education. -Bill Gates
Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people. -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
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. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics. -Bill Gates
If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone. -Bill Gates
People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci because he worked out the 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
India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid. -Bill Gates
Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf. -Bill Gates
Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough. -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
The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and have high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping. -Bill Gates
I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product. -Bill Gates
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs. -Bill Gates
This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places. -Bill Gates
The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream. -Bill Gates
The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids. -Bill Gates
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima – so it’s more visible. -Bill Gates
Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has an incredible impact. -Bill Gates
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen, and even learn. -Bill Gates
People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that. -Bill Gates
The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld. -Bill Gates
The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest. -Bill Gates
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. -Bill Gates
It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear. -Bill Gates
China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%. -Bill Gates
