Bill Gates vs. Baruch Spinoza
Read 20 entries attributed to Bill Gates alongside 20 attributed to Baruch Spinoza. Compare the wording and topic labels.
This page places 20 entries attributed to Bill Gates alongside 20 attributed to Baruch Spinoza. Each selection is ordered by stored importance score. These are selections from QuoteLineage, not complete accounts of either author's work.
Topic labels present in both displayed selections: human nature, justice, time, knowledge, art, mind, religion. Shared labels do not by themselves demonstrate agreement, disagreement, or influence between the authors.
Attributed to Bill Gates, entry #135329: "If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?"
Attributed to Baruch Spinoza, entry #323: "Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
Side-by-Side Comparison
Bill Gates
1915 – 1968
William Henry Gates III is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following Microsoft's initial public offering in 1986 and the subsequent increase in its stock price, Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, at age 31.
"If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?"
#books"We are running the worst testing system, in terms of who gets access to it, of any country"
#human nature"In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a c…"
#justice"Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in,…"
#justice"Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if…"
#time"I'd like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda's Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for De…"
#knowledge"This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into ba…"
#money"The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes t…"
#art"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
#change"When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food a…"
#time"Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes."
#happiness"Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'l…"
#mind"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
#humor"t's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough." It's a nice reader, but there's …"
#religion"Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as g…"
#knowledge"Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company."
"If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act."
#Human Nature"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, Jim Allchin will be glad to …"
#creativity"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
#time"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complet…"
#creativityBaruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677
Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, who was born and lived in the Dutch Republic. A forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century rationalism, and Dutch intellectual culture, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. Influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Ibn Tufayl, and heterodox Christians, Spinoza was a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age.
"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."
#Human Nature"In defining thought as an attribute Spinoza towered above any representative of mechanistic materialism and was at least two centuries in advance of his time…"
#mind"Spinoza's extraordinary views on freedom have never been more relevant. In 2010, for example, the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional a law t…"
#justice"It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to underst…"
#truth"Immortality in Spinoza"
#death"In the year 1888, before leaving the Normal School to face the experiences of actual life, he wrote Credo quia verum. This is a remarkable document, a spirit…"
#religion"Descartes... fell back on his original confusion of matter with space—space being, according to him, the only form of substance, and all existing things but …"
#love"Today I have been reading Linné again and am quite unnerved by this extraordinary man. I have learned an infinite amount from him, not just in botany. Outsid…"
#knowledge"In view of these facts, the assertion is justified that Spinoza's influence on the cultural process of his own race in modern times was almost as powerful as…"
#life"...They have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man , the purest sage , t…"
#power"Hegel is an admirable 'theoretician' of ideology insofar as he is a 'theoretician' of Universal Recognition who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of Abso…"
#knowledge"When we read Spinoza, we are seized with a feeling like that of seeing nature at its grandest in most vigorous repose: a forest of thoughts, tall as the sky,…"
#nature"The encounter between the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century in fact extended over several days. From a letter Leibniz posted to the Duke o…"
#time"We have gathered within the walls of the Communist Academy and are devoting this evening to Spinoza's memory not from the considerations which guided the org…"
#knowledge"...We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the rig…"
#mind"...But when it comes to the subject of the arts, Spinoza is oddly reticent. His failure to consider the aesthetic response—surely a profound facet of human e…"
#art"...Subsequently, he discovered a third master, a liberator of his faith. This was Spinoza, whose acquaintance he made during an evening spent alone at school…"
#life"Spinoza belonged to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, but he was excommunicated for heresy. Few philosophers in more recent times have been so blasphemed an…"
#life"When things got really tough, Spinoza was even deserted by his own family. They tried to disinherit him on the grounds of his heresy. Paradoxically enough, f…"
#life"Instead of engaging in this rather boring academic exercise of opposing Spinoza and Levinas, what I want to accomplish is a consciously old-fashioned Hegelia…"
#philosophy