Melinda Gates

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

Sometimes it's the people you can't help who inspire you the most.

Kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what's wrong with the school system.

Women around the world should have a tool that helps them plan their pregnancies.

I'm constantly saying to myself, 'I'm lucky I was born in the United States.'

Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh.

In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.

The premise of this foundation is one life on this planet is no more valuable than the next.

A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

You can't save kids just with vaccines.

I want to live as private a life as I can because of our children.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.

I'm wholehearted about whatever I do.

We talk a lot in our home together about where we're going, what I'm doing.

If we dont empower women we dont allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

I tell my daughters to have their voice in this world, and it became clear I needed to role model that.

There are absolutely lots of teachers who are trying to come into the profession, but they are not attracted enough to say, 'I'm going to switch careers to do it,' or they are often not retained... because the salaries and the compensation aren't there to make it happen.

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can't get her to come and get them then they won't work.

I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

Helping people doesnt have to be an unsound financial strategy.

All lives have an equal value.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

But we also believe in taking risks, because that's how you move things along.

After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.

We started this mostly from an intellectual place.

A woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.