1980s

• If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
  • Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz.

• It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
  • Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980)

• Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.
  • Comment to reporters during the IBM PC launch (1981), interpreted as a jab at Gary Kildall

• 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.
  • Apple company event (October 1983)

• The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
  • BusinessWeek, 26 November 1984

• I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
  • OS/2 Programmers Guide, November 1987

• There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.
  • Interview with Electronics magazine (1989)

• I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
  • 1989 speech on the history of the microcomputer industry.

1990s

• If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
  • "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991). Note that this quotation has been paired with a misattributed quotation.

• I laid out memory so the bottom 640 K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640 K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining.
  • Bill Gates Interview: Winner of the 1993 Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards. National museum of American history - Smithsonian Institution (1993). Archived from the original on May 10, 2008. Retrieved on October 8, 2014.

• Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed.
  • The Computer Chronicles. "Special Edition: Gary Kildall." 1995

• There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
  • Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995)

• 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, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
  • PBS interview with David Frost (November 1995)

• What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications.
  • Bill Gates Charlie Rose Interview on Charlie Rose (25 November 1996)

• Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
  • TIME magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997)

• As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? … I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students." That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation.
  • Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997)

• It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.
  • TIME magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997)

• We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number — before our doom comes.
  • Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (1997) by Daniel Gross ISBN 0471196533

• One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
  • 1998 a memo to the Office product group

• About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
  • Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998)

• Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.
  • Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998)

• Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
  • Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999)

2000s

• Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
  • Speech at the Computer History Museum, as quoted in InfoWorld magazine (October 2001)

• We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something.
  • .NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002)

• 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 irritating.
  • "Why I Hate Spam" in Microsoft PressPass (2003)

• Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
  • BBC News (24 January 2004)

• Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam.
  • BBC News (24 January 2004)

• Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
  • "The PC Era Is Just Beginning" in Business Week (22 March 2005)

• If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.
  • At Live8 (2 July 2005) as reported in BBC News (4 July 2005)

• Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be.
  • On Blu-ray. interview The Daily Princetonian (14 Oct 2005)

• Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?
  • "In Search of the Real Bill Gates," Time (20 October 2005)

• I wish I wasn't … There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.
  • On being the world's richest man, in an online advertising conference in Redmond, Washington, as quoted in The Guardian (5 May 2006)

• Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.
  • On his use of YouTube to watch videos. "Bill Gates on ...the Competition" in The Wall Street Journal (19 June 2006); also quoted in "Bill Gates' piracy confession" at ComputerWorld.com

• I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.
  • "Bill Gates backs immigration reform on Mexico trip" Reuters (21 March 2007)

• If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. … Let’s be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?
  • Interview with Steven Levy in Newsweek (31 January 2007) "Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut. Now What?"

• "You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that." quoted in (February 2010)

• "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." -Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 17 2007

• Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.
  • Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY

• [I]t's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough." It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, "Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it."
  • "Bill Gates Joins the iPad's Army of Critics. Steve Jobs Couldn't Care Less." CBS MoneyWatch (11 February 2010)

• Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
  • A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education in The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2012)

• Nothing is as good as meeting people who have to live with malaria or HIV or see their children die.
  • "Ask Me Anything" thread on Reddit (25 February 2019)

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Suzanne Lammers, Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry, Harper and Row, ISBN 0-914-84571-3. Text here.

• 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.

• You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong...

• The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

• We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.

• Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.

• The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.

• Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.

• Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.

The Road Ahead (1995)

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

• The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
  • p. 265 in hardcover edition, corrected in paperback

• One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,"

TED, February (2009)

• This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.
  • Video may be viewed here.

Regarding Bill And Melinda Gates' Polio Efforts (2009)

• The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear:

We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don’t let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio. "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Our Role in the Polio Eradication Initiative" Medizinische Universität Wien (12 December 2009)

• The success of the Nigeria programme hinges on the active participation of everyone to make sure that all children are reached by National Immunization Days (NIDs), Immunization Plus Days (IPDs) and the routine immunization programme, if the country capitalizes on the commitments I’ve heard in the past two days, Nigeria can lead the way to a polio-free Africa. "Bill Gates visits Nigeria" polioeradication.org (04 February 2009)
• We are in the end game, I'm optimistic that we will be successful. I'm personally very committed "Gates, others pledge $630 million to beat polio" Investing.com (21 January 2009)
• I’d like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda’s Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda’s hometown. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she’ll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She’s in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl.

Our children only know what polio is because of their aunt. Otherwise, the disease would just be another historical fact they learn about in school. In fact, even though I was born just three years after one of the worst polio epidemics in American history, I didn’t know anyone with polio when I was growing up. That’s how far we’ve come. "Bill Gates - Rotary International" Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (21 January 2009)

• In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a couple of thousand. "Bill Gates - Rotary International" Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (21 January 2009)

TED, February 2010

• First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that (forecast) by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3 (per year).

(Full speech on the official website of the TED Conference)

• Let's burn the 99%.

(Referring to Nuclear Fusion involving commonly available elements as opposed to Nuclear Fission with rare Uranium)

July 2013

• He [Steve Jobs] showed me the boat he was working on … and talked about how he's looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn't happen.
  • cbsnews.com

The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

...The mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about... I think it makes sense to believe in God...

• The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.
  • Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine. March 27, 2014.

• 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. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.
  • Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine. March 27, 2014.

Politico.com interview 2014

• We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it’s all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically.
  • politico.com