Bill Gates

"Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So …"

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

"We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number — before our doom comes."

"...this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way. It's shocking. It's unbelievable — the fact that we would be among the worst in the world."

"Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana."

"We always have to be serious about public health in a global sense and surveillance for "the next one", because we don't know where it will emerge."

"It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of."

"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 simp…"