77 Classic Bill Gates Quotes To Build The Next Digital Empire

If you’re seeking a list of quotes by Bill Gates, you’re probably planning to build your own online empire. One that can see you capitalize on the many great opportunities available online today.

And better yet – you’ve got the real data to make smarter decisions. Bill Gates, on the other hand, didn’t know if Microsoft would be a success, and yet, he executed every single working day on his vision after dropping out of Harvard.

Needless to say, that relentless hustle and grind worked out well for Bill!

Today he’s worth an astounding $147.7 billion dollars which continues to climb year on year. That’s the power of building royalties as a revenue stream in your business.

Now, if you’re prepared to get in there and do the work, you might have your own digital empire in the next 5 to 10 years. Sure, it may not have the size and scalability of a personal computer company, but the real wealth of today is being made online.

Whatever you choose, it’s going to take relentless ambition, passion and perseverance every single day. #nodaysoff, right?

Bill Gates encompasses many of the values we hold at Execute Resources, and there is much you can learn from this list of powerful quotes and sayings.

1. If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

Bill Gates

2. As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

Bill Gates

3. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Bill Gates

4. There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position.

Bill Gates

5. If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.

Bill Gates

6. Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you. Find yourself.

Bill Gates

7. To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

Bill Gates

8. It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Bill Gates

9. Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Bill Gates

10. Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

Bill Gates

11. We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

Bill Gates

12. Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Bill Gates

13. We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Bill Gates

14. I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

Bill Gates

15. Patience is a key element of success.

Bill Gates

16. Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Bill Gates

17. The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

Bill Gates

18. If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

Bill Gates

19. Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

Bill Gates

20. We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Bill Gates

21. Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.

Bill Gates

22. You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines show us the way.

Bill Gates

23. Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity – the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

Bill Gates

24. The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.

Bill Gates

25. Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.

Bill Gates

26. I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

Bill Gates

27. In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

Bill Gates

28. Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

Bill Gates

29. The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Bill Gates

30. I’m a big believer that as much as possible, and there’s obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.

Bill Gates

31. In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions.

Bill Gates

32. Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated.

Bill Gates

33. In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

Bill Gates

34. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

Bill Gates

35. 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 before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Bill Gates

36. Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.

Bill Gates

37. Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Bill Gates

38. The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

Bill Gates

39. I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.

Bill Gates

40. When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

Bill Gates

41. Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

Bill Gates

42. People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they?

Bill Gates

43. The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

Bill Gates

44. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‘satisfactory,’ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

Bill Gates

45. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Bill Gates

46. The best teacher is very interactive.

Bill Gates

47. I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

Bill Gates

48. The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

Bill Gates

49. Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it’s really let us down.

Bill Gates

50. We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

Bill Gates

51. In this business, by the time you realize you are in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless your running scared all the time, you’re gone.

Bill Gates

52. Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

Bill Gates

53. Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.

Bill Gates

54. You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Bill Gates

55. This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Bill Gates

56. A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.

Bill Gates

57. I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

Bill Gates

58. The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Bill Gates

59. Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until ever inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Bill Gates

60. In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation’s future.

Bill Gates

61. I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

Bill Gates

62. Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.

Bill Gates

63. Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.

Bill Gates

64. If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.

Bill Gates

65. Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

Bill Gates

66. If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?

Bill Gates

67. Life is not fair, get used to it.

Bill Gates

68. Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

Bill Gates

69. We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

Bill Gates

70. I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

Bill Gates

71. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

Bill Gates

72. A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is, and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.

Bill Gates

73. I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!

Bill Gates

74. Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

Bill Gates

75. Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.’

Bill Gates

76. I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don’t just think, ‘Yes, my country is doing well,’ but you think about the world at large.

Bill Gates

77. If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, But if you die poor it’s your mistake.

Bill Gates