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.
— Bill Gates
The U.S. immigration laws are bad - really, really bad. I'd say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government's name.
You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.
Africa is on the rise.
I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems.
The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.
Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it's always been a bit complicated.
In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.
The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.
I have a nice office. I have a nice house... So I'm not denying myself some great things. I just don't happen to have expensive hobbies.
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.
People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.
Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.
One of the statistics that always amazes me is the approval of the Chinese government, not elected, is over 80 percent. The approval of the U.S. government, fully elected, is 19 percent. Well, we elected these people and they didn't elect those people. Isn't it supposed to be different? Aren't we supposed to like the people that we elected?
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.'
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
I think there will be PCs at every price point.
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
When you revolutionize education, you're taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you're priming the pump for so many incredible things.
Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.
Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.
I don't like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.
We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.
Our teachers deserve better feedback.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.
Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.
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.
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.
We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn't make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.
Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.
The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.
Common Core is a big win for education.
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.
The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
I'm going to retain a lot of Microsoft's stock.
No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
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.
