Philanthropists From The United States

"In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund. People will try and sell you other things because there’s more money in it for them if they do. And I’m not saying that that’s a conscious act on their part. Most good salespeople believe their own baloney."

"I call investing the greatest business in the world ... because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."

"America has never forgotten — and never will forget — the nobler things that brought her into being and that light her path — the path that was entered upon only one hundred and fifty years ago … How young she is! It will be centuries before she will adopt that maturity of custom — the clothing of the grave — that some people believe she is already fitted for."

"It will fluctuate."

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead."

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

"In the Baruch proposal our government suggested the creation of the International Authority by the United Nations to which would be given a complete monopoly of all atomic installations, materials and stockpiles. This authority should be given power of inspection and power to call for the punishment of violators."

"A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs."

"I'm not smart. I try to observe. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why."

"A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren’t still there, he’s no longer a political leader."

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing."

"When beggars and shoeshine boys, barbers and beauticians can tell you how to get rich it is time to remind yourself that there is no more dangerous illusion than the belief that one can get something for nothing."

"I am interested in physical medicine because my father was. I am interested in medical research because I believe in it. I am interested in arthritis because I have it."

"I am quite sure that in the hereafter she will take me by the hand and lead me to my proper seat."

"To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am."

"There are no such things as incurable, there are only things for which man has not found a cure."

"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."

"Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."

"Although the shooting war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer."

"Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us. We can depend only on ourselves."

"Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration. Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human dignity. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics."

"Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out salvation … Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction."

"It's a business I don't know anything about, but I admire Bill Gates enormously. I know him individually, and I think he's incredible in business."

"Bill Gates [in his] new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" [asserts that if] humanity is to win the great race between development and degradation . . . green innovation must accelerate. . . . [G]iven the pressing need to decarbonise the global economy, says Mr Gates, "we have to force an unnaturally speedy transition" [to carbon-free energy, and the] linchpin of his argument is the introduction of a meaningful carbon price to account for the externalities involved in using dirty energy. . . . Ultimately his book is a primer on how to reorganise the global economy so that innovation focuses on the world’s gravest problems. It is a powerful reminder that if mankind is to get serious about tackling them, it must do more to harness the one natural resource available in infinite quantity — human ingenuity."

"In an interview with The Economist last month, Bill Gates stated that millions of people in developing countries would die before the COVID-19 pandemic was over. He noted, importantly, that 90 percent of the deaths would not result from the virus itself, but from "indirect" effects. These include most prominently the economic impact of the pandemic, as well as other causes such as the overwhelming of medical and public health resources, which increases fatalities from other diseases. Gates was not exaggerating at all. It's easy to see how this horror will materialize, if we project forward from the current situation. The World Food Program projects that the number of people facing acute hunger will nearly double this year, from 135 to 260 million."

"In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to 'reinvent education.' Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created 'a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates'] ideas...all these buildings, all these physical classrooms-why with all the technology you have?' In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades."

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

"[Gates] apparently has made more money than anyone else his age, ever, in any business."

"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates. Gates is a good man."

"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie."

"Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age."

"He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry."

"Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his."

"There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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,."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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