Bill Gates Quotes
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Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It's never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care [in Africa], the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there.
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In some ways, if you make mistakes with your own money, you don't feel as bad about it as if it was someone else's.
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It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
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I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.
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The leader needs to create an environment in which people can analyze the situation and develop a good response.
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We're only at the beginning of what we have to do here.
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This is not about trade, no one is a stronger supporter of capitalism and trade than I am. This is about sovereignty and whether a country has the right to set its own public health policies.
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The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.
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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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Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.
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When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to - by 1990 it was down to 10% - now it's down to 5%. And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution? It's really energy intensity.
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I have $100 billion... You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime.
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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."
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If somebody is considering being willing to go out and work in the field in global health, those are a particular class of heroes because it's hard to work in those places. Our foundation gets so many of our learnings from people who've been out there and seen, "this tool is not going to work there, there's more of a problem here than you know." You should really get involved in that.
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What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
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In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
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The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.
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A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.
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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.
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See the clock only when you have No work.... Don't see the clock when you are working.... Clock is a lock for success...
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I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.
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Having kids has been a fantastic thing for me. It's meant that I'm a little more balanced. In my twenties I worked massively, hardly took vacation at all. Now, I, with the help of my wife, I'm always making sure I've got a good balance of how I spend my time.
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At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.
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People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they?