Bill Gates Quotes
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Contrary to Piketty’s rentier hypothesis, I don’t see anyone on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending.
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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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I was announcing to the public, in 2006, that I'd be leaving Microsoft in a couple of years and focusing full-time on the foundation. That was the time at which we went back to New York and Warren [Buffett] announced these gifts to a number of foundations, with a very high percentage of it going to us and basically doubling our capacity.
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Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.
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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.
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I think philanthropy is also growing and catching on. Figuring out how the philanthropy sector, which is quite small compared to the private sector, which is the biggest by far, and then the governments, you know, even in these poor countries over time has to take on these key responsibilities. How does philanthropy accelerate that? Drive the kind of innovations, make sure they get used well. So it plays this kind of special role.
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Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.
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A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.
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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.
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In programming when you're making a change you have to know all the affected places, and you have to be able to model in your head what the performance impact will be.
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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.
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There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.
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If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. It tries to balance out.
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Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.
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The 'Billionaire' song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny.
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There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer.
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We get Comfort from those who agree with us, but we get Growth from only those who don't agree with us !
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Looking at these issues as a businessman, I believe that investing in the world's poorest people is the smartest way that our government spends money.
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The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.
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Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.
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Solutions to all biological problems are greatly advanced by the sequencing work and the new tools that are created.
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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.
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Even though I only have a high-school degree, I'm a professional student.
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We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.