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Bill Gates
97 quotes
“If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK. If you free up human labor, you can help elder people better, have smaller class sizes – you know, the demand for labor to do good things is still there. And then if you ever get beyond that, you have a lot of leisure time and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates teases the possibility of a 3-day work week where ‘machines can make all the food and stuff’ (November 23, 2023)
“So the idea of being able to explain something in a succinct form is such a cool thing, and it requires you to know a field so well.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates Returns", on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, found on DeepCast (14 March 2024)
“Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’. It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speaking to the Financial Times about Elon Musk and the cuts made to USAID by the Department of Government Efficiency. Bill Gates to give away $200 billion by 2045, says Musk is "killing" world's poorest children Reuter…
“People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates blog post, May 8, 2025 as quoted by the BBC Bill Gates plans to give away most of his fortune by 2045 BBC News. May 9, 2025
“One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The transition to AI can cause many jobs disappear forever.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates quotes on AI (Aug 2026)
“The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong...”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear: We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don't let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Our Role in the Polio Eradication Initiative" Medizinische Universität Wien (12 December 2009)
“The success of the Nigeria programme hinges on the active participation of everyone to make sure that all children are reached by National Immunization Days (NIDs), Immunization Plus Days (IPDs) and the routine immunization programme, if the country capitalizes on the commitments I've heard in the past two days, Nigeria can lead the way to a polio-free Africa.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates visits Nigeria" polioeradication.org (04 February 2009)
“We are in the end game, I'm optimistic that we will be successful. I'm personally very committed.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gates, others pledge $630 million to beat polio" Investing.com (21 January 2009)
“In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a couple of thousand.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates - Rotary International" Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (21 January 2009)
“First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that (forecast) by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3 (per year).”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's burn the 99%.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He [Steve Jobs] showed me the boat he was working on ... and talked about how he's looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn't happen.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. 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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with Rolling Stone magazine. March 27, 2014.
“We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it's all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way. It's shocking. It's unbelievable — the fact that we would be among the worst in the world.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“40,000 people came out of China, 'cause we didn't ban the rest of them citizens from coming back, so we created this rush and we didn't have the ability to quarantine those people, and that seeded the disease here”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are running the worst testing system, in terms of who gets access to it, of any country”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talking about COVID testing [according to October 10, 2020
“Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on Twitter , Apr 14, 2020
“There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. . . . Zero is what we need to aim for [by the year 2050 to] stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change . . . .”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I [have become] convinced of three things: 1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to get to zero {net emissions by the year 2050}. 2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. 3. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. . . . [M]ost countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. . . . That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]ith transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest. In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To get [the breakthroughs on the "Technologies needed" list] ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to . . . [q]uintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. . . .”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It helps to set ambitious goals and commit to meeting them, the way countries around the world did with the 2015 Paris Agreement. It’s easy to mock international agreements, but they’re part of how progress happens: If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a Citizen . . . Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. . . . [M]ake clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. . . . Look locally as well as nationally. . . . Run for office.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a Consumer . . . Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. . . . Reduce your home's emissions. . . . Buy an electric vehicle. . . . Try a plant-based burger.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should spend the next decade focusing on the technologies, [governmental] policies and market structures that will put us on the path to eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. It's hard to think of a better response to a miserable [year of COVID-19 disruptions during] 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I laid out memory so the bottom 640 K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640 K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? ... I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students." That was, uh — that was the end of that conversation.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997)
“India is an example of a country where there's plenty of things that are difficult there -- the health, education, nutrition is improving and they are stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it's very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off and it's kind of a laboratory to try things that then when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places. And so our biggest non-US office for the Foundation is in India and the most number of pilot roll out things we're doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. If you go there and you've never been you might think whoa this is a chaotic place and you know you're not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at the same time but you will get a sense of vibrancy.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates, Dec 04, 2024, quoted in Bill Gates courts controversy for calling 'India a kind of laboratory to try things'. The Economic Times
“I'd like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda's Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda's hometown. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she'll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She's in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl. Our children only know what polio is because of their aunt. Otherwise, the disease would just be another historical fact they learn about in school. In fact, even though I was born just three years after one of the worst polio epidemics in American history, I didn't know anyone with polio when I was growing up. That's how far we've come.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates - Rotary International" Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (21 January 2009)
“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. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with Rolling Stone magazine. March 27, 2014.