TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index G > Bill Gates Quotes

Thumbnail of Bill Gates (source)
Bill Gates
(28 Oct 1955 - )

American businessman who dropped out of Harvard University, yet cofounded Microsoft, a computer software company whose business practices were at times ruled to be anti-competive in several court battles.


Science Quotes by Bill Gates (8 quotes)

Computer science … jobs should be way more interesting than even going to Wall Street or being a lawyer--or, I can argue, than anything but perhaps biology, and there it’s just a tie.
— Bill Gates
From interview (24 May 2004) in Scientific American (Jun 2004), 45.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Biology (232)  |  Computer (131)  |  Computer Science (11)  |  Interesting (153)  |  Job (86)  |  Lawyer (27)  |  More (2558)  |  Tie (42)  |  Wall (71)  |  Way (1214)

Hey, size works against excellence.
— Bill Gates
Upside (Apr 1992). Quoted in Thomas J. Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992), 554.
Science quotes on:  |  Against (332)  |  Excellence (40)  |  Size (62)  |  Work (1402)

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
— Bill Gates
PBS interview with David Frost (Nov 1995). In Lisa Rogak (ed.) The Impatient Optimist - Bill Gates in his Words (2012), 107.
Science quotes on:  |  Approach (112)  |  Doing (277)  |  God (776)  |  Happen (282)  |  Know (1538)  |  Principle (530)  |  Religious (134)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Term (357)  |  Terms (184)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Why (491)

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
— Bill Gates
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Lose (165)  |  People (1031)  |  Seduce (4)  |  Smart (33)  |  Success (327)  |  Teacher (154)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinking (425)

The Chinese are clearly inculcating the idea that science is exciting and important, and that’s why they, as a whole—they're graduating four times as many engineers as we are, and that's just happened over the last 20 years.
— Bill Gates
NPR Radio interview, Morning Edition, (29 Apr 2005). In Lisa Rogak (ed.) The Impatient Optimist: Bill Gates in his Words (2012), 32.
Science quotes on:  |  China (27)  |  Chinese (22)  |  Engineer (136)  |  Excitement (61)  |  Exciting (50)  |  Graduation (6)  |  Happen (282)  |  Happened (88)  |  Idea (881)  |  Importance (299)  |  Inculcate (7)  |  Last (425)  |  Time (1911)  |  Whole (756)  |  Why (491)  |  Year (963)

The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by those two American bicycle mechanics to create it.
— Bill Gates
In Time/CBS News, 'The Wright Brothers, People of the Century (1999), 42.
Science quotes on:  |  American (56)  |  Application (257)  |  Bicycle (10)  |  Create (245)  |  Leonardo da Vinci (87)  |  Flying (74)  |  Flying Machine (13)  |  Genius (301)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Machine (271)  |  Mechanic (120)  |  Mechanics (137)  |  Methodical (8)  |  Two (936)

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.
— Bill Gates
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Airplane (43)  |  Become (821)  |  Bring (95)  |  Brother (47)  |  Create (245)  |  Cultural (26)  |  First (1302)  |  Force (497)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greatest (330)  |  Idea (881)  |  Invention (400)  |  Language (308)  |  People (1031)  |  Single (365)  |  Together (392)  |  Value (393)  |  Wide (97)  |  World (1850)  |  World Wide Web (4)  |  Write (250)  |  Writing (192)

To be a good professional engineer, always start to study late for exams. Because it teaches you how to manage time and tackle emergencies.
— Bill Gates
Webmaster has not yet found a primary source to verify this quote. Can you help?
Science quotes on:  |  Emergency (10)  |  Engineer (136)  |  Exam (5)  |  Good (906)  |  Late (119)  |  Manage (26)  |  Professional (77)  |  Start (237)  |  Study (701)  |  Tackle (6)  |  Teach (299)  |  Time (1911)



Quotes by others about Bill Gates (2)

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.
Science quotes on:  |  Achieve (75)  |  Belief (615)  |  Define (53)  |  Essential (210)  |  Everything (489)  |  Examine (84)  |  Gate (33)  |  Goal (155)  |  Logic (311)  |  Machine (271)  |  Programming (2)  |  Rearrange (5)  |  Sequence (68)  |  Ultimate (152)  |  Will (2350)

There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn’t slow down with a new batch of features.
In The Chicago Tribune (1 Feb 1998).
Science quotes on:  |  Chip (4)  |  Down (455)  |  Feature (49)  |  Gate (33)  |  Never (1089)  |  New (1273)  |  Say (989)  |  Slow (108)


See also:
  • 28 Oct - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Gates's birth.
  • Bill Gates: Hero or Villain?, by Michael Lancaster. - book suggestion.

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.