Top 15 Bill Gates Quotes

If you're born poor it's not your fault, but if you die poor it's your fault.

Choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

640 K ought to be enough for anybody.

Life is not fair. Get used to it... Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.

We should spend the next decade focusing on the technologies, [governmental] policies and market structures that will put us on the path to eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. It's hard to think of a better response to a miserable [year of COVID-19 disruptions during] 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.

As a Consumer . . . Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. . . . Reduce your home's emissions. . . . Buy an electric vehicle. . . . Try a plant-based burger.

As a Citizen . . . Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. . . . [M]ake clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. . . . Look locally as well as nationally. . . . Run for office.

It helps to set ambitious goals and commit to meeting them, the way countries around the world did with the 2015 Paris Agreement. It’s easy to mock international agreements, but they’re part of how progress happens: If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol.

To get [the breakthroughs on the "Technologies needed" list] ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to . . . [q]uintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. . . .

[W]ith transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest. In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships.

Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. . . . [M]ost countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. . . . That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too.

When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.