Quotes from Bill Gates

America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.

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.

I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.

There's a lot that can be done for people who are using technology in a better way.

People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing.

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.

If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!

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

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.

WWW? Nice toy, but what a waste of time.

We'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time.

By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things.

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it's very inexpensive to send mail.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

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.

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.