Quotees Archive

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

- Bill Gates

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

- Bill Gates

We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.

- Bill Gates

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

- Bill Gates

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

- Bill Gates

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

- Bill Gates

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

- Bill Gates

The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

- Bill Gates

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

- Bill Gates

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

- Bill Gates

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

- Bill Gates

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

- Bill Gates

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

- Bill Gates

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

- Bill Gates

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

- Bill Gates

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

- Bill Gates

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

- Bill Gates

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

- Bill Gates

There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints.

- Bill Gates

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

- Bill Gates

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‘The government’s corrupt,’ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

- Bill Gates

There’s only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that’s already been written.

- Bill Gates

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

- Bill Gates

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

- Bill Gates

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

- Bill Gates

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.

- Bill Gates

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

- Bill Gates

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

- Bill Gates

The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.

- Bill Gates

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

- Bill Gates

The potential financial reward for building the ‘next Windows’ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

- Bill Gates

The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.

- Bill Gates

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

- Bill Gates

The spread of online information isn’t just good for charities. It’s also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

- Bill Gates

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

- Bill Gates

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.

- Bill Gates

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

- Bill Gates

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.

- Bill Gates

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

- Bill Gates

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.

- Bill Gates

The U.S. couldn’t even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They’ll be killing each other again in less than a year. I’m sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.

- Bill Gates

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

- Bill Gates

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

- Bill Gates

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

- Bill Gates

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.

- Bill Gates

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

- Bill Gates

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

- Bill Gates

The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

- Bill Gates

The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.

- Bill Gates

The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.

- Bill Gates