It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
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.
When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.
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 never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'
In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.
You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
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.
When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.
Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.
People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.
It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it's very inexpensive to send mail.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career.
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it's extremely hard to block anything - extremely hard. You'll never get perfect blocking.
India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
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.
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
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.