Quotes from Bill Gates

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

Vaccination is one of the easiest things on the way to development. It's much easier than roads and a great education system. It's very basic. It's one of the first things you want to get right.

Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it's always been a bit complicated.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

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.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you're trying to do?

You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.