If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.

Bill Gates

Categorized in : Inspirational Leadership Real

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually... by Bill Gates

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

dollars australia helping

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best. by Bill Gates

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

quality research

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever.

linux people moving

If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.

sunset presidential airplane

When you develop software, the people who write the software, the developers are the key group but the testers also play an absolutely critical role. They're the ones who ah, write thousands and thousands of examples and make sure that it's going to work on all the different computers and printers and the different amounts of memory or networks that the software'11 be used in. That's a very hard job.

writing jobs memories

Anything that someone's interested in should be very, very easy to call up onto the screen. And in fact the computer over time will see what you're interested in and make that immediately available without your having to be give any commands at all.

computer giving facts

The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software.

creation important running

There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect.

ecosystems risk ocean

Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.

tiny east government

The US in some ways has been the best. Who figured out shale gas? Although that wasn't a good thing [for CO2 levels], it was very innovative. It's led to low-cost energy. Who figured out nuclear power? Largely the United States. Once you get past the steam engine, which is mostly British, then the US has been at the center of most of the energy things that have happened.

united-states energy past

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies."

innovation energy commitment

You might say, well, aren't people saying that about wind and solar today? Not really. Only in the super-narrow sense that the capital costs per output, when the wind is blowing, is slightly lower.

cost wind people

At the end of the day, natural-gas peakers sit back there and get financed so that the Midwest corridor can have a huge [period] of four to five days of no wind. The peakers are running big time to make that up, because that is the swing piece that can always be turned on.

swings running wind

Our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium - the 99.3 percent that's cheap as heck, and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah, Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years. You're taking that and you are converting it to plutonium - and then you're burning that.

kentucky flames years

The UK is a very international country. by Bill Gates

The UK is a very international country.

international country

We really have to work hard to remind people even though this is far away, that's it's probably the most generous thing governments have ever come together to do. Since World War II, this new institution is the only one that's emerged and is saving all these lives.

government hard-work war

You have to be willing to see that sometimes the governments of these poor countries don't come through. You have to think about that as a constraint. How do you help them be better? How do you come up with things that actually work, even in those tough situations.

government country thinking

The idea of explaining why free trade is good, why immigration is good, why the world is so connected, that we need to think in terms of humanity and being generous to each other, you know, that's proving to be a challenge.

challenges ideas thinking

The first big effects will be farmers that live on the edge. Today's weather, they barely get by. Their kids, a high percentage are malnourished, and so if you impose more variable weather and more heat, you're getting more floods, more droughts, and during the germination time, the high heat, most crops...do poorly when there's more heat.

variables weather kids

I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

sorry people years