Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.
The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.
I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.
Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.
When you have the medical advances you think will they be available to everyone. Will they not just be for the rich world or even just the rich people and the rich world? Will they be for the world at large?
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.
The most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer... I even knew not to get married until later because I was so obsessed with it. That's my life's work.
If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.
When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.
For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.
Whether you believe it a moral imperative or in the rich world's enlightened self-interest, securing the conditions that will lead to a healthy, prosperous future for everyone is a goal I believe we all share.
The world today has 6.8 billion people...that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.
The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.
There's a unique thing about the UK, where you give a very generous foreign aid budget to support globally, which is spent wisely. We partner with the government here to make sure that that money is spent well.
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.
In 1990, one in 10 children died before the age of five. That's now down to one in 20, and vaccines were the single biggest factor in that. Had it stayed at 10 percent, 122 million more children would have died.
Even in some of our vaccine areas, like an AIDS vaccine, things have taken longer than we expected, but we have the pipeline of tools. The biological information that we have that gives us insights is fantastic.
It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died.
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.
Finally, assuming that many of those are fulfilled, which won't be easy in tight budget times, we're taking the supply side at the basic research level, because that's where government is absolutely fundamental.
Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.
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.
I am not a huge gamer. My son knows a LOT more than I do about what is cool on Xbox. I played Halo but the sports games that the whole family can use are the things I use the most. I threw the javelin very very far!
My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier.
My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.
There is this broad, broad recognition of how technology is enabling new things. Companies that never paid attention to computers in any form now see digital technology as creating threats and opportunities for them.
You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs.
The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible.
Even when things are stable, that's not easy [to work in Africa] because there are not roads, and the weather is tough, the education system hasn't been there. But this is how you get great countries, is step by step.
Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.
Creating a piece of software is always complicated because you're doing something new. If you just wanted something that had been done before you'd just use that old piece of software. So there are no repetitive tasks.
Melinda [Gates] has been my partner in raising the kids and I went from before I met her, intentionally having an unbalanced life, to having a more balanced life with all sorts of fun things that she and I do together.
We're in a period of uncertainty about [Donald Trump] administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.
I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, a responsibility to give back to society and a responsibility to see that those resources are put to work in the best possible way to help those most in need.
From the day Microsoft was started, the only constraint to our growth has been attracting ah, more great programmers, very smart, committed, ah, people. And so we're always on... on the look for ah, that kind of person.
I have not met [Donald] Trump and discussed any issues with him. There have been Republican administrations like the [George] Bush administration who initiated this AIDS generosity. So it's not purely a right-left thing.
We are seeing smarter philanthropy, more philanthropy, and that's true world wide. So it's kind of a movement that has a lot of accomplishments, even though as a percentage of the economy, it's still only a few per cent.
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.
If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.
The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they'll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.
I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.
In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.
My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.
China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.
The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.
Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.
The idea of explaining why free trade is good, why immigration is good, why the world is so connected, that we need to think in terms of humanity and being generous to each other, you know, that's proving to be a challenge.
The Chinese are clearly inculcating the idea that science is exciting and important, and that's why they, as a whole-they're graduating four times as many engineers as we are, and that's just happened over the last 20 years.