Melinda Gates Thinking Quotations

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don't die of diarrhea anymore, but it's a huge problem in the developing world.

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.

[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.

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

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.

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?'

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.