Melinda Gates People Quotations

We would be driving down the street in a place like Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and started to see, my gosh, the only people that have shoes are men. Why does that woman have a baby in her belly and one on her back, and she's carrying a huge load of bananas? You start to ask these questions.

People are respectful when we're out with the children on a normal evening, and it couldn't be a better place to live for those reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

Sometimes it's the people you can't help who inspire you the most.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.