All Quotes

"Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now."

"There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities."

"The bicycle had what is called the 'wabbles', and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. Against nature, but not against the laws of nature."

"When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic — for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All Democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the Republicans and Mugwumps know it. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats and Mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."

"The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had it, the last one will possess it. If left to himself, a man is most likely to use only the mischievous half of the force—the half which invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them; and if he is one of these—very wise people, he is quite likely to scoff at the beneficent half of the force and deny its existence. And so, to heal or help that man, two imaginations are required: his own and some outsider's. The outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the healing-power that is curing A, and A must imagine that this is so. I think it is not so, at all; but no matter, the cure is effected, and that is the main thing. The outsider's work is unquestionably valuable; so valuable that it may fairly be likened to the essential work performed by the engineer when he handles the throttle and turns on the steam; the actual power is lodged exclusively in the engine, but if the engine were left alone it would never start of itself. Whether the engineer be named Jim, or Bob, or Tom, it is all one—his services are necessary, and he is entitled to such wage as he can get you to pay. Whether he be named Christian Scientist, or Mental Scientist, or Mind Curist, or King's-Evil Expert, or Hypnotist, it is all one; he is merely the Engineer; he simply turns on the same old steam and the engine does the whole work."

"Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.""

"From the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick to receive the candle. But man is only briefly competent:...After fifty his performance is of poor quality; the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great quality to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new."

"When Adam ate the apple in the Garden and learned how to multiply and replenish, the other animals learned the Art, too, by watching Adam. It was cunning of them, it was neat; for they got all that was worth having out of the apple without tasting it and afflicting themselves with the disastrous Moral Sense, the parent of all the immoralities."

"The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life."

"Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes."

"I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing."

"Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more."

"Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be."

"I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."

"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. ... Let's be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"

"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."

"[I]t's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough." It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, "Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.""

"Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive."

"When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. Today, the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes."

"The only way you can get to the very positive scenario [in the fight against climate change] is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve."

"Most governments take advantage of their scientists and listen to them. They don't undermine them and attack them."

"Usually, you'd expect the worst to be the "ground zero" country — in this case, China, then the next wave, which was all in Asia, and then in Europe, and then finally, the U.S. We had all this community spread. With a travel ban, where you actually force people to come back from China, you have to have a way to be able to either just assume they're infected and quarantine them, or test them. And then if they test positive, to have that enforced quarantine. We actually seeded a lot of infection by saying, 'Okay, everybody, residents and citizens come back (and not testing or quarantining).'"

"We always have to be serious about public health in a global sense and surveillance for "the next one", because we don't know where it will emerge."

"Well, one thing that everybody may not be aware of is how fantastic the CDC has been historically. They're the best in the world. They train themselves in terms of how to communicate, including getting bad news out and getting people to take measures that protect themselves. And they've been muzzled."

"You can make sure wind turbines can deal with the cold"

"The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine"

"The big concern is about the generations yet to come when [AI] gets way smarter than it is right now. And if a person with Mal intent was using that, say, for a cyberattack, or to make a deep fake that makes a politician look like they're doing something awful, or even one of your relatives saying, okay, I've been kidnapped."

"If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK. If you free up human labor, you can help elder people better, have smaller class sizes – you know, the demand for labor to do good things is still there. And then if you ever get beyond that, you have a lot of leisure time and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it."

"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."

"India is an example of a country where there's plenty of things that are difficult there -- the health, education, nutrition is improving and they are stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it's very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off and it's kind of a laboratory to try things that then when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places. And so our biggest non-US office for the Foundation is in India and the most number of pilot roll out things we're doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. If you go there and you've never been you might think whoa this is a chaotic place and you know you're not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at the same time but you will get a sense of vibrancy."

"Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’. It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,."

"The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one."

"People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them."

"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."

"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."

"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

"The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."

"We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing."

"Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program."

"The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future."

"Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down."

"Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better."

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

"One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,""

"This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set."

"The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear: We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don't let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio."

"The success of the Nigeria programme hinges on the active participation of everyone to make sure that all children are reached by National Immunization Days (NIDs), Immunization Plus Days (IPDs) and the routine immunization programme, if the country capitalizes on the commitments I've heard in the past two days, Nigeria can lead the way to a polio-free Africa."

"We are in the end game, I'm optimistic that we will be successful. I'm personally very committed."

"I'd like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda's Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda's hometown. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she'll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She's in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl. Our children only know what polio is because of their aunt. Otherwise, the disease would just be another historical fact they learn about in school. In fact, even though I was born just three years after one of the worst polio epidemics in American history, I didn't know anyone with polio when I was growing up. That's how far we've come."