Top 1132 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Gates - Page 18

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.

Natural epidemics can be extremely large. Intentionally caused epidemics, bioterrorism, would be the largest of all.

Even though I only have a high-school degree, I'm a professional student.

I've for some reason or other... never met Donald Trump.

Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.

The only big companies that succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does.

I have always loved the competitive forces in this business. You know I certainly have meetings where I spur people on by saying, "Hey, we can do better than this. How come we are not out ahead on that?" Thats what keeps my job one of the most interesting in the world.

I don't think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren't something I considered very important.

Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

We [US] are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute. This is another issue where hopefully we will take a long-term approach which, even though we sometimes have a hard time doing that, it's easier for us, as a rich country with this kind of scientific depth, than it is for the poor countries who will suffer the problems.

Microsoft Products are Generally Bug Free

Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

The United States has a huge budget deficit so taxes are going to have to go up and I certainly agree they should go up more on the rich than everyone else. That - that's just justice.

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.

I believe it’s not only possible to eradicate malaria; I believe it’s necessary. Ultimately, the cost of controlling it endlessly is not sustainable. The only way to stop this disease is to end it forever.

Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It's never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care [in Africa], the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there.

The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill.

I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.

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

With world health, every life you save is a wonderful thing, so it's not this question of whether you solve it or you don't. The chance of completely solving the problems has long odds. But really, the thing is that you get to save the first child, the second child, the third child. You can just feel good about that.

There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.

You know, development sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things and nothing much happens, which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you'd also have to say that venture capital is pretty stupid, too. Its hit rate is pathetic. But occasionally, you get successes, you fund a Google or something, and suddenly venture capital is vaunted as the most amazing field of all time. Our hit rate in development is better than theirs, but we should strive to make it better.

The most straightforward path would be if we could bring the cost of solar electric and wind down by another factor of say, three, and then have some miraculous storage solution, so that not only over the 24-hour day but over long periods of time where the wind doesn't blow, you have reliable energy. That's a path. But energy storage is hard. That's not a guaranteed path.

Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.

There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.

Every company can choose whether to lead or follow the emerging digital trends.

If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

If you're asking whether I intentionally mess up my hair, no, I don't. And certain things, like my freckles, they're just there. I don't do anything consciously. I suppose I could get contact lenses. I suppose I could comb my hair more often.

We need to get a broader awareness. People say climate change is really bad, but painting that picture of what you're putting at risk.

I find golf very relaxing. It's a way to get away from work and get outside. It's a lot of fun, and once you get going it's almost kind of addictive.

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.

... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.

Depending on how quickly you get ocean rise, you have people who live in river deltas [at risk]. Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm, it's destructive-type situations like you saw in New Orleans with Katrina. You're increasing the frequency of that stuff in low-lying areas fairly dramatically.

When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work.

I do normal kind of contributions, particularly for people who are going over to Africa and help highlighting global health, and that's tended to be pretty bipartisan in nature because of the coalition there exists fortunately around these global health issues. But I don't think my backing, putting a lot of money into political contributions is a way I'm going to try and help improve the world.

Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection.

No more misquoted forms, lost invoices, redundant entries, missing checks, or delays caused by incomplete paperwork.

My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy.

When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.

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

Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now.

The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.

There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that.

I love nuclear. It does this radiation thing that's tricky. But they're good solutions. You know, it was interesting; recently, in Connecticut this natural gas plant blew up 11 guys. It just blew them up.

Taxes are an investment in America.

Customer service will become the primary value added function of every business.

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.

When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large.

In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s.

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.