Quotes from Bill Gates

If geek means you're willing to study things, and if you think science and engineering matter, I plead guilty. If your culture doesn't like geeks, you are in real trouble.

Our vision, which has not changed since the day the company was founded.

There were a lot of missteps in the early days, but because we got in early we got to make more mistakes than other people.

That way you can be certain to learn something you didn't know previously.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren't dependent on Washington doing something different.

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.

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

The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don't think over time that's a good way to go. I'm a huge believe in digital currency... but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I'm not involved in Bitcoin.

The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

If I hadn't given my money away, I'd have had more than anyone else on the planet.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

It's easier to add things on to a PC than it's ever been before. It's one click, and boom, it comes down.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less.

The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right.

Intermittency [in availability for wind and solar] changes the economics, particularly this requirement that the power company at all times be able to require power. That's large.

It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge.