Bill Gates quotes: quote magic from Mr. Microsoft.
“Patience is a key element of success.”
“I never took a day off in my 20s. Not one.”
“The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.”
“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”
“Life isn’t fair. Get used to it.”
“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.”
“Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. It’s utility is entirely in building an organization and getting resources out to the poorest in the world.”
“I failed in some subjects, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.”
“If you’re born poor, it’s not your mistake; if you die poor, it is.”
“Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated.”
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
“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.”
“Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.”
“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.”
“Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”
“On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.”
“Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.”
“What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much more interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.”
“Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.”
“Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.”
“A company’s ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.”
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
“To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.”
“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
“It’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.”
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
“If geek means you’re willing to study things, and if you think science and engineering matter, I plead guilty. If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.”
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”
“I spend a lot of time reading.”
“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.”
“Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.”
“Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people – it causes wonderful inventions to be done.”
“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. If you’re too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. After all, why bother deciding an issue if it isn’t really decided?”
“Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.”
“I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.”
“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.”
“Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.”
“If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.”
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
“Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.”
“Flipping burgers is not beneath you. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping – they called it opportunity.”
“Life has a tendency to just happen. But it happens because we make choices. The life you create and design for yourself is going to accumulate from the choices you make over time. Sure, there are unexpected things that can derail dreams. But we can control what we focus on, and if we choose to put one dream ahead of another.”
“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”
“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.”
Related: Warren Buffett quotes.
