Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

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

My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

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

The best teacher is very interactive.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'

Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of politics.

I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.

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.

The 'Billionaire' song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny.

If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

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.

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me 'Trey' because I'm William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I'm also known.

People are always coming up to me and saying, 'I heard your dad's speech, and it's really great.' And they'll mention some place I didn't even know my dad was going to.

Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.

When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that's expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren't used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

Success is steady progress toward one's personal goals.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.

Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.