Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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Though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard…
Bill Gates

Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
Bill Gates

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
Bill Gates

[In 2007] If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not.
Bill Gates

[In 2007 both Bill and Melinda Gates] We asked: ‘How could the world let these children die?’ The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
Bill Gates

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism…
Bill Gates

We can make market forces work better for the poor… if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.
Bill Gates

Skeptics… They say: ‘Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just - don’t - care.’ I completely disagree.
Bill Gates

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
Bill Gates

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
Bill Gates



To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact.
Bill Gates

[In 2007] Even with the advent of the Internet and 24 hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems.
Bill Gates

It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help.
Bill Gates

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring.
Bill Gates

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have…
Bill Gates

If you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers… you have to convey the human impact of the work…
Bill Gates

[On a Davos global health panel taking about ways of saving millions of lives.] Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it…
Bill Gates

I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
Bill Gates

You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact.
Bill Gates

The future can be different from the past.
Bill Gates



[In 2007] The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
Bill Gates

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Bill Gates

Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
Bill Gates

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?… Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?… These are not rhetorical questions - you will answer with your policies.
Bill Gates

My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’
Bill Gates

When you consider what those of us here… have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
Bill Gates

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities.
Bill Gates

Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
Bill Gates

Judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities…
Bill Gates

Judge yourselves… on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Bill Gates



Good luck.
Bill Gates

[In 1991] In the last ten years, DOS has become the foundation of the PC industry and has sold more than ten times any other software package.
Bill Gates

[On predicting that another 18 million copies of DOS would be sold with computer systems in 1991] It’s not just that number that’s astounding. It’s the whole phenomenon behind it.
Bill Gates

[On his childhood] It was a rich environment in which to learn.
Bill Gates

[On using his first dumb terminal] We were off in our own world. Nobody quite understood the thing but us. I wanted to figure out exactly what it could do.
Bill Gates

I read ahead in math, so I really didn’t spend much time on math classes in school. Even when I got bad grades in everything else, which was up through the eighth grade, I always did well in math.
Bill Gates

[On Paul Allen] Paul thought I had this attitude like I understood things. So when he got stuck he would say, ‘Hey, I bet you can’t figure this out!’ He would kind of challenge me… and it was pretty hard stuff.
Bill Gates

[On going to Paul Allen’s house] He had read four times as much as I had. And he had all these other books that explained things. So I would ask him, ‘How do guns work? How do nuclear reactors work?’ Paul was good at explaining stuff. Later, we did some math stuff and physics stuff together. That’s how we got to be friends.
Bill Gates

I was the mover. I was the guy who said. ‘Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it.’
Bill Gates

[When he was 13 years of age] It was when we got free time at C-Cubed that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night.
Bill Gates



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