And don’t forget to check out these and .
1. “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
2. “Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.”
3. “I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.”
4. “Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.”
5. “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
6. “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”
7. “Life is not fair, get used to it!”
8. “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
9. “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.”
10. “If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
11. “Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you. Find yourself.”
12. “I’m a big believer that as much as possible, and there’s obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.”
13. “I am not a topper in my university but all toppers are working in my Microsoft company.”
14. “I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.”
15. “I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”
16. “Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.”
17. “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.”
18. “Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.”
19. “The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.”
20. “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
21. “Patience is a key element of success.”
22. “Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world… if you do so, you are insulting yourself.”
23. “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”
24. “If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.”
25. “If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.”
26. “People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they?”
27. “I am not in competition with anyone but myself.”
28. “Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.”
29. “I don’t know’ has become ‘I don’t know yet’.”
30. “Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.”
31. “This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.”
32. “Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping—they called it opportunity.”
33. “If you are born poor it’s not your mistake. But if you die poor it’s your mistake.”
34. “If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.”
35. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
36. “Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.”
37. “Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.”
38. “My goal is to improve myself continuously.”
39. “The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.”
40. “The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It’s harmful.”
41. “The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.”
42. “I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.”
43. “I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!”
44. “Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity—the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.”
45. “We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.”
46. “Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.”
47. “Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.”
48. “China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.”
49. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.”
50. “The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.”
51. “A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.”
52. “Most poor people live in the poorest countries.”
53. “Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.”
54. “Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.”
55. “Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.”
56. “I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.”
57. “Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we’d want to get involved.”
58. “Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now help me spread the word about Giving Tuesday!”
59. “As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can’t pay. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.”
60. “Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rainforest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.”
61. “I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.”
62. “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.”
63. “Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way until ever inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.”
64. “With tech companies, whoever’s the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’ And—there’s more—more times people think that’s the case than it really is the case.”
65. “The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.”
66. “Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.”
67. “In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions.”
68. “It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.”
69. “The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.”
70. “I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don’t just think, ‘Yes, my country is doing well,’ but you think about the world at large.”
71. “There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.”
72. “You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines show us the way.”
73. “The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.”
74. “I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.”
75. “I failed in some subjects in the exam, but my friend passed it all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.”
76. “The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.”
77. “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.”
78. “The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy—even beyond the market opportunities—that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.”
79. “The part of uranium that’s fissile—when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two—is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.”
80. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
81. “To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.”
82. “If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.”
83. “Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated.”
84. “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.”
85. “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.”
86. “In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.”
87. “In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that’s safer, doesn’t require us to go around the world to get all our oil.”
88. “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.”
89. “I studied everything but never topped. But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees.”
90. “Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.”
91. “In this business, by the time you realize you are in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless your running scared all the time, you’re gone.”
92. “In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation’s future.”
93. “Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.”
94. “The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.”
95. “A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is, and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.”
96. “A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.”
97. “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 50.”