Quotes from Bill Gates

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?

The CEO's role in raising a company's corporate IQ is to establish an atmosphere that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it.

Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.

A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

It's possible - you can never know - that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.

When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.

Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.

Playing bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like.

I don't think culture is something you can describe.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'

Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.

Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Computer science … jobs should be way more interesting than even going to Wall Street or being a lawyer--or, I can argue, than anything but perhaps biology, and there it's just a tie.

When I was young I liked taking tests. I happened to be good at it. Certain subjects came easily, like math. All the science stuff. I would just read the textbooks in the first few days of class.

People care a lot that the USA is well run, and people globally expect us to do things in upgrading science and more.

If we have optimism without empathy then it doesn't matter how much we master the secrets of science. We're not really solving problems, we're just working on puzzles.