Quotes by Melinda Gates

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.

— Melinda Gates

Success

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

— Melinda Gates

Success

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.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

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

— Melinda Gates

Life

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

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

All lives have an equal value.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

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

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

But we also believe in taking risks, because that's how you move things along.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

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

— Melinda Gates

Life

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

— Melinda Gates

Education

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

— Melinda Gates

Success

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.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

I want to live as private a life as I can because of our children.

— Melinda Gates

Life

I'm wholehearted about whatever I do.

— Melinda Gates

Love

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

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

We started this mostly from an intellectual place.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

We talk a lot in our home together about where we're going, what I'm doing.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

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.

— Melinda Gates

Success

You can't save kids just with vaccines.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom

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.

— Melinda Gates

Life

There's a false perception that women in Africa somehow don't love their babies they way we do, don't grieve their loss the way we would. That is simply not true.

— Melinda Gates

Love

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

— Melinda Gates

Wisdom