Melinda Gates Quotes

Take time to learn about the lives of women around the world-and try to play a small part in their fight to create the future they deserve.

All lives have an equal value.

You can't save kids just with vaccines.

If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women.

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.

If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

One life is worth no more or less than any other

Now we just really need to do the work, which we're doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

What great changes have not been ambitious?

Sometimes it's the people you can't help who inspire you the most.

You are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

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

Women and girls should be able to determine their own future, no matter where they're born.

Deep human connection is ... the purpose and the result of a meaningful life - and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.

If we don't empower women, we don't allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development

Make sure you continue to trust what you know now about yourself and stay true to what you believe in

All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

Connect deeply with others. Our humanity is the one thing that we all have in common.

A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.

Philanthropy is not about the money. It's about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

It's the mark of a backward society — or a society moving backward — when decisions are made for women by men.

We have to open up to others. We have to give up the need to be separate and superior.

Great wealth can be very confusing. It can inflate and distort your sense of self — especially if you believe money means merit.

Mothers might say they'd go to the doctor. In poor countries, moms are usually responsible for their kids' health. But breastfeeding and traveling to the clinic take time, and research shows that health care is one of the first tradeoffs women make when they're too busy.

The fact that 98 percent of women in [the U.S.] who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives.

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.

When girls are educated and free to pursue their passions, they contribute more to a thriving society. When women have a voice, they raise it to demand a life that is greater than what they've been told they have a right to expect. And these demands change the future for everyone.

Think, for a moment, about our educational ladder. We've strengthened the steps lifting students from elementary school to junior high, and those from junior high to high school. But, that critical step taking students from high school into adulthood is badly broken. And it can no longer support the weight it must bear.

It's really one of my all-time favorite things to do. To go out and really see the kids and visit the moms who are in these programs because I think I really get to see what happens on the ground and connect with them about what changes are that happen in their lives because of some of the giving that we're able to do.

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.

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.

Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

I'm happy we have three healthy children and we'll stay with three healthy children.

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

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.

Women around the world should have a tool that helps them plan their pregnancies.

In places like India with smartphones, there's an app now for women if they're in a violent situation, they can press one button. They've given their cell-phone number to five trusted friends, and right away their GPS location goes out: "Here I am."

With economic opportunity, sometimes it's making sure that if they're not in a place where they can have good jobs, that when they have economic opportunity, they have digital tools to use.

Around the world we have girls in primary school at about the same rate now as boys, but keeping them in quality secondary schools is where the world is lagging. I'm seeing a lot of countries look at this now.

We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we'd invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I've probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.

[Bill Gates] wanted me to stay working at Microsoft, but I didn't think he could be CEO and we could have the family life that we both had growing up, which is what we envisioned. I knew I would go back to work at some point later to some profession. I just didn't know what.

I went to business school, and I went straight from that to a nine-year career at Microsoft. Eventually, I ran a big chunk of the consumer products division for Microsoft.Then I left with the birth of our first daughter because Bill and I both wanted to have a few kids.

Women and girls face a whole host of issues. We start with health, so we work very deeply on maternal deaths, making sure that a mom doesn't die in childbirth, making sure that she has access, for instance, to AIDS medication.

If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can't even yet agree on what their laws should be.

Today is International Women's Day, and there's a fantastic set of pieces running by an organization called ONE called "Poverty Is Sexist." It's a great way to quickly learn about what's actually going on for women in poverty around the world, and then do something about it.

Now, as smartphones are coming up, there are all kinds of apps that will start to be developed that will help women.

Despite the debunking, you have a small group in the last five years that hasn't wanted to vaccinate their children, for instance, for measles. Then, all of sudden, we got an outbreak of measles and kids were starting to die from measles.

In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine.

We set out what's going to be our work time versus our foundation time versus family time, and we'll reassess that... sometimes every week.

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?'

When we better understand the realities of these women's lives, we are able to design and deliver solutions that are more useful to them.

Poverty disproportionately affects women around the world.

Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.

If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It's a man. Who's left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.

If you can't travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you're making.

That's universal - we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.

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.

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

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

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don't die of diarrhea anymore, but it's a huge problem in the developing world.

Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh.

But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.

Sanitation issues in the developing world affect women more than they affect men.

As a parent, the responsible thing to do - if you love your child - is to vaccinate your child.

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

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

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

I felt suicidal. I couldn't stop crying. I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if the car crashed and I died?

Helping people doesn't have to be an unsound financial strategy.

It's important to remember that behind every data point is a daughter, a mother, a sister—a person with hopes and dreams.

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can't get her to come and get them then they won't work.

Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.

I'm wholehearted about whatever I do.

Bill and I both firmly believe that even the most difficult global health problems can be solved.

If you don't have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won't change the trajectory for students.