Bill Gates Quotes
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The willingness to hear hard truth is vital not only for CEOs of big corporations but also for anyone who loves the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds like bad news, but it is just what we need.
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Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
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One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.
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My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
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Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.
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Hopefully, whether it's energy or child vaccines, the case of the many benefits helping countries so that they are stable, so these refugee problems that have been troubling for Europe - a little less so for the U.S. but, even so, a lot of controversy there - these things are why the future's going to be better than the past. People really do look to the United States, so we'll be there making the case.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
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Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to Warren Buffett, that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.
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The government is there day in and day out, if you want all kids to have education, if you want to run courts, if you want to have an army, if you want to have roads, you've got to have the taxation system that funds everything that you expect.
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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.
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If we think long term, the younger generation here is better about embracing the world. Not seeing countries boundaries kind of an "us versus them" thing.
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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.
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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.
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The challenge here is to design a system where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more for the poor. I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.
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Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause - and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
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I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
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Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don't approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
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The best teacher is very interactive.
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Don't wallow in failure. Instead, learn from it.
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In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
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If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.
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Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.