Quotes from Bill Gates

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.

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.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

Polio's pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it's just there as a gift for the rest of time.

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.

I didn't used to wear a watch. Now I have a SPOT watch, which I wear all the time.

In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.

India is more of an aid recipient than a provider of aid.

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

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.

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.

Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It's more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.

Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.

Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.

The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

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

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.

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