history Quotes

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

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... ...

In the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car. Actually, the dark horse in that race was internal combustion, but because of the... ...

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly 'cause all the... ...

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing -... ...

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it's just such a dramatic success.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.