Quotes By Bill Gates

I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

One thing I've always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they'll tell you, 'We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.'

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.

The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.

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

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.

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.

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.

Playing bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like.

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use email and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the emails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.