Melinda Gates Quotes

We talk a lot in our home together about where we're going, what I'm doing.

We started this mostly from an intellectual place.

We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.

There's a false perception that women in Africa somehow don't love their babies they way we do, don't grieve their loss the way we would. That is simply not true.

There are absolutely lots of teachers who are trying to come into the profession, but they are not attracted enough to say, 'I'm going to switch careers to do it,' or they are often not retained... because the salaries and the compensation aren't there to make it happen.

The premise of this foundation is one life on this planet is no more valuable than the next.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh.

Kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what's wrong with the school system.

In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

I'm wholehearted about whatever I do.

I'm constantly saying to myself, 'I'm lucky I was born in the United States.'

I want to live as private a life as I can because of our children.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

Government funding that's coming from the United States is making a huge difference on the ground in the developing world. It's really palpable - it's making a huge difference saving lives.

But we also believe in taking risks, because that's how you move things along.

All lives have an equal value.

After a number of years dating, we decided we were good partners.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.