Bill Gates

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

If you cant make it good at least make it look good.

Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

I'm not a macroeconomics person.

The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

I'm going to retain a lot of Microsoft's stock.

Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it's aid-neutral.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam - those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that's legitimate.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

I don't think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC based data centers notebook and Tablet PCs handheld devices and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it at their desks in a meeting on the road or even in the air.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.

Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses - it's progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

My wife thinks she's better than me at puzzles. I haven't given in on that one yet.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

Its the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren't dependent on Washington doing something different.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that's expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren't used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

The best teacher is very interactive.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

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

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

With tech companies, whoever's the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, 'Is this the end of them?' And - there's more - more times people think that's the case than it really is the case.

I will always choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.

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

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

It's easier to add things on to a PC than it's ever been before. It's one click, and boom, it comes down.

Climate change is a terrible problem and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

The kids are a big part of my schedule.

DNA is like a computer program but far far more advanced than any software ever created.

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.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.

People everywhere love Windows.

In ninth grade I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadnt been getting good grades but I decided to get all As without taking a book home. I didnt go to math class because I knew enough and had read ahead and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

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.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

We all need people who will give us feedback. Thats how we improve.

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.

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

Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.

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.

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

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

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.

In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

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

Digital reading will completely take over. It's lightweight and it's fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.

Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

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.

I am results-oriented.

U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.

On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

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.

Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

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

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.