Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company. - Bill Gates

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.

So the idea of being able to explain something in a succinct form is such a cool thing, and it requires you to know a field so well.

One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today.