I’m always striving for greatness, and I won’t let anyone hold me back.

I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone but on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented. Didn’t they?

Intelligence is not quite as important as I thought it was, and it takes many different forms.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism.

The returns in investing in the poor are just as great as returns in investing in the business world, and have even more meaning.

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we’d want to get involved.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

Life is not fair, get used to it!

Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world…if you do so, you are insulting yourself.

Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.

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.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work’.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

When you have money in hand only you forget who are you but when you do not have any money in your hand, the whole world forgets who you are. It’s life!

Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily.

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they?

Only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.

Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

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.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.

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

Life is not fair — get used to it!

Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world… if you do so, you are insulting yourself.

It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions.

I am not in competition with anyone but myself. My goal is to improve myself continuously.

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is, and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.

Life is not fair, get used to it.

The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

I studied every thing but never topped.. But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees.

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.

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires

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 best teacher is very interactive.

Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.

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.

I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

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

You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines show us the way.

There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.

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.

If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?

If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until ever inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

I’m a big believer that as much as possible, and there’s obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you. Find yourself.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a day – and overestimate what they can accomplish in a year.

In this business, by the time you realize you are in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless your running scared all the time, you’re gone.

In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation’s future.

Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.

Well, I went for a ride but I didn’t find my car.

I studied every thing but never topped.. But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It’s like saying that as of 1932, cars didn’t have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.

The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it.

To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.

If you can’t make it good,at least make it look good.

The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.

So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act.

Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it

Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Computers are great because when you’re working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It’s feedback you don’t get from many other things.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not.

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

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.

If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft, and I am the owner of Microsoft.

It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information.

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

It’s absolutely paradoxical that we have two companies that were absolutely critical of our work and yet we’re working with them on climate.

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

If you’re born poor, it’s not your mistake. But if you die poor, it is your mistake.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss.

You know, we were worried that computers would do everything we did. Fortunately, we were wrong.

It’s not a good idea to implement the same solution in different places.

The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.

The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.

Patience is a key element of success.

It’s pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and people didn’t think they were useful to where they are now.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities.

It’s fine to have a celebration of success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

We always have been and always will be a nation of immigrants.

Life is not fair; get used to it.

It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

It’s not your product that’s important; it’s the people behind it.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon.

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

It’s fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.

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.

Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.

Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

We always said that if the government does its job well, it can be a catalyst, an accelerator.

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.

We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

It’s not your product that’s exciting. It’s what your product will do for the customer.

If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.

We’re changing the world with technology.

Your success will be defined by the decisions you make.

If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor it’s your mistake.

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.

It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.