Quotes from Bill Gates

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they?

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.

Make it just like a Mac.

I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.

Giving money effectively is almost as hard as earning it in the first place.

Looking at these issues as a businessman, I believe that investing in the world's poorest people is the smartest way that our government spends money.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

Ridiculous sums of money can be confusing.

Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of politics.

It is hard to sell Congress and the American people on foreign aid. Is it harder to do that than it is to sell billionaires on the idea that they should give all their money away.

To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

If you believe that all men are created equal, then a child's death in some other country is no less tragic than in the United States.