Bill Gates

“Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.”

“Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.”

“Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.”

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

“The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.”

“It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

“Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.”

“There's no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, 'The government's corrupt,' and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.”

“To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”

“Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.”

“We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.”

“OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me 'Trey' because I'm William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I'm also known.”

“My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.”

“Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.”

“We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.”

“Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.”

“In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.”

“Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.”

“The future of advertising is the Internet.”

“If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?”

“For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.”