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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.

On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved in the last 20 years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.

(Talking about his first computer) Like all kids we not only fooled around with our toys, we changed them. If you've ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules, such as "Red cars can jump all others," then you know that this impulse to make a toy do more is at the heart of innovative childhood play. It is also the essence of creativity.

I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt... They made their way through the machine... A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.

At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.

The US spends more on energy R&D than all other countries put together, and I personally consider it quite inadequate.

What are the top 20 universities in the world that do good materials research that might create carbon fibers to do jet stream kites or new magnets that will allow [energy] generation to be done up there and you just bring the electricity down. You either have to bring down rotational energy, which is hard, or you have to have the generator up there and bring down the electricity. Well, putting the generator up there is hard to do because it's too heavy.

When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.

We need to look at less obvious paths, things like the wind in the jet stream, which is very high up. The material science of what type of kite string you would need to connect up to that. That's still at the basic research level.

Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved.

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 love building the products, seeing people use the products but you know along with success comes the need for a dialogue with the government.

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the

The only big companies that succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does.

When you have a product that has zero sales, it is easy for people to say whatever they want about it and almost fantasize about it.

I went public too soon. Stay private as long as you can.

Think of business as a good game. Lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.

Every company can choose whether to lead or follow the emerging digital trends.

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

The inventory, the value of my company, walks out the door every evening.

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.

This antitrust thing will blow over.

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.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

When you lose a customer, it can be tempting to tell each other, "That customer's not very sharp. They just made the wrong decision".

Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.

America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed, or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools-even when they're working as designed-cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.

Thanks to quality education, Israel is one of the most advanced countries in the world .. Israel is advancing in high-tech even more than other developed countries.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

Melinda [Gates] has been my partner in raising the kids and I went from before I met her, intentionally having an unbalanced life, to having a more balanced life with all sorts of fun things that she and I do together.

Bridge is the king of all card games.

My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine, so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.

My wife thinks she's better than me at puzzles. I haven't given in on that one yet.

My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.

I have a nice office. I have a nice house... So I'm not denying myself some great things. I just don't happen to have expensive hobbies.

Married life is a simpler life. Who I spend my time with is established in advance.

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

I did not even finish my studies

I try to make time for reading each night. In addition to the usual newspapers and magazines, I make it a priority to read at least one newsweekly from cover to cover. If I were to read what intrigues me- say, the science and business sections - then I would finish the magazine the same person I was when I started. So I read it all.

I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.

Something like Windows is still an unbelievable asset but because the world is somewhat phone-centric, it's an asset that has to be managed very carefully to make sure that it's extended, and there are very interesting things that are being done with that.

If we [Microsoft Corporation] weren't still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company. Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.

Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It's never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care [in Africa], the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there.

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.

Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection.

Philanthropy should be voluntary.

I know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.[Bill] Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the [George] Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.

In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren [Buffett] things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.

We are seeing smarter philanthropy, more philanthropy, and that's true world wide. So it's kind of a movement that has a lot of accomplishments, even though as a percentage of the economy, it's still only a few per cent.

Billionaires should never be responsible for solving problems, because they're not the government.

I don't think there's a... boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

Today, the issue isn’t quantity of food as much as it is quality-whether kids are getting enough protein and other nutrients to fully develop.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

We got a malaria initiative, really a phenomenal time, even though in the early stages there was some uncertainty. Then of course [Barack] Obama, although he had budget constraints, he believed in these things; a lot of new initiatives, including in agriculture.

The key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health.

[AIDS ] is not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.

I think Ebola is a great example of where the world really needs to come together. The three countries where this outbreak took place have had a lot of civil war, very weak health systems. And so, it did take a while for people to understand ....that eventually what we saw was a very unique Ebola epidemic. I think it is quite impressive what's being pulled together, and I think we will be able to get this under control.

Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there.

We'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence.

People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.

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

It's easier to add things on to a PC than it's ever been before. It's one click, and boom, it comes down.

Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it's taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, 'Let's get out the camera and get that shot.' You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.