Bill Gates Quotes

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

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

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

“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.”

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

“If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”

“Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”

“In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition.”

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

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

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

“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 fifty.”

“I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet.”

“Being a visionary is trivial. Being a CEO is hard. All you have to do to be a visionary is to give the old "MIPS to the moon" speech — everything will be everywhere, everything will be converged. Everybody knows that. Which is different from being the CEO of a company and seeing where the profits are.”

“I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world — the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair. Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries — but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.”

“I think 20 years is the right balance between giving as much as we can to make progress on these things and giving people a lot of notice that now this money will be gone.”

“I am still an optimist because I see what innovation accelerated by artificial intelligence will bring. But these days, my optimism comes with footnotes.”

“I think our system can be a lot more progressive. I have paid $10 billion but I should have had to pay more on my capital gains.”

“Sometimes I think my most important job as CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention. And that's the beginning of the end.”