On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can’t compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s free market enthusiasms.

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‚play‘ with them!

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

Everybody is entertained to death.

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.

It’s just trying to do the best job I can in these opportunities that I get to show what I can do, be consistent, have good feedback, be fast, at the same time not make mistakes.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

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

After ten years of word processing, I can’t even do hand writing anymore.

Managers today have to do more with less, and get better results from limited resources, more than ever before.

It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

The Web and new technology offer more opportunities to reach a world market at a lower price. Today, a person can start a business at home and reach the world market.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process.

I think I became more productive through not having children. I never really had the desire to have them. My husband didn’t want them either, so it worked out well.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.

The wealth of information now available at the click of a finger amazes me.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

A lot of times, people have something that they’re afraid of. They’ve got a client that’s mad at them. They’ve got a project that’s due. And they let that stress hang over their head. I don’t let that happen.

Well, I’m working all the time to stay out of trouble!

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

Tell me I have to be somewhere, and I’ll be there 20 minutes early and stay there longer than anybody else. You hold up a lot of people if you’re not on time.

I don’t write letters anymore.

I’m an iPod person.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Lost time is never found again.

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

Always do whatever’s next.

How do people relate to movies now, when they’re on portable devices or streaming them? It’s not as much about going to the movies. That experience has changed.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

The Internet is a toilet. It is.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.