Best 142 quotes of Melinda Gates on MyQuotes

Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can't even yet agree on what their laws should be.

All of a sudden people in the United States start to realize that vaccines make a difference. The controversy and the myth that's there, we're always trying to bust through that. So when I see a disease outbreak, I say to myself, "OK, that'll get people realizing how lucky we are to have vaccines.

All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones.

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.

Around the world we have girls in primary school at about the same rate now as boys, but keeping them in quality secondary schools is where the world is lagging. I'm seeing a lot of countries look at this now.

As a parent, the responsible thing to do - if you love your child - is to vaccinate your child.

As a woman finds economic opportunity, even if she's only earning a couple of dollars a day, if she can save it on her phone, she then makes different decisions for her household than her husband might.

A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.

Bill and I both firmly believe that even the most difficult global health problems can be solved.

Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That's the place that governments often don't want to, or can't, work.

[Bill Gates] wanted me to stay working at Microsoft, but I didn't think he could be CEO and we could have the family life that we both had growing up, which is what we envisioned. I knew I would go back to work at some point later to some profession. I just didn't know what.

Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.

Childbearing, I mean, if there's no place to go to deliver your baby, then you're the one that's delivering in those unhealthy circumstances. Or if you can't get access to family planning, your chances of surviving and being able to bring your kids up if they come one right after the other, that locks you into a cycle of poverty.

Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant, but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision-makers. When women have the power to make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what demographers, economists, and development experts recommend. They invest in the long-term human capital of their families.

Deep human connection is ... the purpose and the result of a meaningful life - and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.

Despite the debunking, you have a small group in the last five years that hasn't wanted to vaccinate their children, for instance, for measles. Then, all of sudden, we got an outbreak of measles and kids were starting to die from measles.

Even in decision-making, we work in self-help groups. That is women coming together in small groups of 10 to sometimes 15 women, where they start to get education about their rights, about clean water and sanitation, about how to have a healthy birth. You can bring in all kinds of education to them that way.

Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.

Everyone agrees that the failure of our high schools is tragic. It's bad business, and it's bad policy. But we act as if it can't be helped. It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them.

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.

Helping people doesn't have to be an unsound financial strategy.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it's increasingly girls, not boys, who don't know how to read.

Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.

I am Catholic, I was raised Catholic, I am a practicing Catholic. But I say we need to agree to disagree. We have a shared mission around poverty, and I focus on that, because we do a lot with the Catholic Church around poverty alleviation. I'm always looking for: what is the common thread? What do we care about? What do we believe in? We believe in women around the world. We believe in all lives have equal value.

I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past.

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

I felt suicidal. I couldn't stop crying. I remember thinking, wouldn't it be great if the car crashed and I died?

If I really believe all lives have equal value, and if I use contraceptives, which I do, and if I'm counselling my son and my two daughters to use them, how am I not serving the women who don't have access to the contraceptives they need?

If we don't empower women, we don't allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

If we're going to make progress on this issue [of contraception], we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future.

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.

If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It's a man. Who's left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.

If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

If you can't travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you're making.

If you don't have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won't change the trajectory for students.

If you don't invest in the woman, empower her, give her the things she needs to lift her family up, you're just not going to make the progress that you want to make. But if you put her at the centre, you can change a lot for that family, and it has ripple effects through the economy.

If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.

If you look back at history, [Dale ] Carnegie highlighted the need for libraries to be a place where everyone could go to read if you didn't have access to books. Philanthropy can be a place that'll take a risk or point to areas to make sure they are the right government investments to reduce inequalities.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

I'm constantly saying to myself, 'I'm lucky I was born in the United States.

I'm happy we have three healthy children and we'll stay with three healthy children.

In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine.

In places like India with smartphones, there's an app now for women if they're in a violent situation, they can press one button. They've given their cell-phone number to five trusted friends, and right away their GPS location goes out: "Here I am.

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.

In the developing world, they don't have smartphones yet. They have the older plastic phones, but women are saving money on those, because they don't have access to banks. Having that access to digital money changes everything for her because she actually doesn't have to negotiate with her husband, which she will tell you is very hard in these circumstances, especially when the means are meager. She's expected to have money to pay for the kids' health or to help with the school fees.

In the United States, there's definitely some controversy about birth control in general, and I think we needed to split the debate and have people realize that we actually agree as a country about contraceptives. Over 93 percent of American women say they use contraceptives, and they feel very good about it.

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

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.

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.