Bill Gates Quotes
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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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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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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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Every company can choose whether to lead or follow the emerging digital trends.
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Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.
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Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.
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Vaccination is pretty special because you can do a vaccination campaign anywhere in the world. All you are doing is gathering women from the villages, getting them the vaccines and asking them to go around and find the children.
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I'd be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.
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We weren't trying to just go public and get rich. There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we'd sort of put one foot in front of the other.
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I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.
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To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
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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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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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We all have the chance to create a world where extreme poverty is the exception rather than the rule.
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The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.
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People think about this idea that there's 122 million kids that are alive that would not be if that fatality rate had stayed at the 1990 level, that's 122 million families.
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Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.
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People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they?
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The computer will live your life, listen to you and understand you better than humans can.
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I really do think cancer will largely be a solved problem. I think most of the infectious diseases like malaria - our foundation is very involved - once we're finishing polio eradication, then starting up this malaria eradication, and getting that done as fast as we can.
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Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
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I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
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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.