Bill Gates Quotes
- All Quotes
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Death is something we really understand extremely well.
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There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.
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China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.
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The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill.
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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.
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Improving the health & productivity of the poorest is one of the best investments you can make in the future of the world...
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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.
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SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it's very inexpensive to send mail.
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You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
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If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity.
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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.
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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.
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When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.
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I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.
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The vision is that people should have the ultimate in convenience. Being able to get the things they care about on the appropriate device.
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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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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.
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In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren Buffett things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.
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Billionaires should never be responsible for solving problems, because they're not the government.
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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.
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I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
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Creative capitalism takes this interest in the fortunes of others and ties it to our interest in our own fortunes in ways that help advance both. This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.
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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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Two years from now, spam will be solved.