Bill Gates

Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities.

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

I realized about 10 years ago that my wealth has to go back to society. A fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best not passed on to one's children. It's not constructive for them.

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

I'm serious when I do my work. I'm not serious when I'm home with my kids.

I love building the products, seeing people use the products but you know along with success comes the need for a dialogue with the government.

There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

Whatever they announce, they announce. They're in their honeymoon period, and anything they announce gets hype ... They will obviously branch out beyond Internet search, but I think the expectations won't live up to reality.

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.

Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.

The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.

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.

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

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.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.